


as i see it now

by bygoneboy



Category: The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Car Accidents, Emotional Baggage, Exploration, Ghost Towns, Hitchhiking, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom, Reincarnation, Road Trips, Soulmates, takes place in 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:40:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 20,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bygoneboy/pseuds/bygoneboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He is not granted everlasting life. He is not even given the assurance of a happy mortal one. <i>But it will be this,</i> the immortal promises him, dropping his plea into the hands of the Fates like a drop of water, rippling through a pool, <i>always.</i></p><p><i>Again, and again, and again.</i>" </p><p>Patrochilles Reincarnation Road Trip AU, modern day, set in the western United States.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I just got back from a road trip to California and Yosemite, and it was an incredibly beautiful and meaningful experience for me, made more meaningful by Madeline Miller's "Song of Achilles", which I brought with me and read for a second time while I was out hiking and adventuring. I couldn't help thinking that both Achilles and Patroclus would really love it there. 
> 
> While I was in Yosemite I climbed Half Dome, which was an exhausting 12 hour hike round-trip. I had a lot of time to myself, to think and reflect, and about halfway up the mountain, this popped into my head. I wrote most of it on my iPod in the notes section, and I'm just starting to sort through and edit it now. 
> 
> I'm trying out a new writing style in this! I think the way that Miller writes is so beautifully poetic, and I kind of try to keep that poetic feel here. I'm sorry if it feels awkward or unwarranted, hopefully the contrast between the style and the story won't be too clunky. 
> 
> There's a lot in here that means the world to me. I hope it can mean something to you, too.

_1266 B.C._

\---

It has a simple beginning, as all things intricate do. Before time seems to matter. Before years are counted down, and days are numbered precious.

In a cave, on a mountain, there is a boy. 

He is slight and slender, dark haired, dark skinned. In his arms rests a not-yet-hero, a not-quite-god. A miracle, he thinks. Beautiful. Golden. 

_It will be this,_ he vows, wordlessly, running his fingers across the olive brow of his companion, smoothing his palm over his cheek. _It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me._

He is young. He knows death, but not so intimately as he might. He knows pain, but he does not carry it as closely as he will. It is a lull, a false safe harbor, here in the cave on the mountain, and he nor the golden boy in his arms understand the true weight of the world. 

Somewhere above on the slopes of Olympus, an immortal who does takes pity on him. 

_It will be this._

It was not quite a wish. Not an answer to a question. Still, the boy should have known the power such a vow held. 

He is not granted everlasting life. He is not even given the assurance of a happy mortal one. _But it will be this,_ the immortal promises him, dropping his plea into the hands of the Fates like a drop of water, rippling through a pool, _always._

_Again, and again, and again._


	2. Dice

_2006 A.D._

\---

I am seventeen years old when I kill the boy that lives down the street from me.

It is not exactly my fault. I am a careful driver, so careful that my instructor had sometimes complained. “Patroclus,” she had said, "You drive like there's a cop around every corner." In the fearful buzzing of my imagination, there always was. 

I was a thin, quietly nervous child, and to no one’s shock, I grew to be a thinner and quietly nervous teenager. My father signed me up for week-long cross country camps and enrolled me in a variety of contact sports, and I marvelously failed at both, returning home battered and bruised, and still very much a useless disappointment. I was incredibly average. Spectacularly normal. All right at many things, but never quite good at one in particular. What I excelled in most was simply being myself-- and staying out of the way. 

The boy that lived down the street from me runs a stop sign a month before graduation, and I discover, within a matter of seconds, that it is hard to stay out of the way when a small, silver sedan is speeding toward the right side of your SUV, and you are looking to the left. 

I remember glass shattering, and the huff of the airbag. The soft cartilage of my nose bending inward, snapping. My breath pressing out of my lungs. The passenger door, and the seat next to me, crumpling, like tissue paper. 

But my car spins, once, twice, screeches to a halt, and although there is glass is imbedded in my shoulder and blood trickling from beneath my hair, I am in one piece. 

The silver sedan has folded almost completely in half. 

The boy’s brains hang out of the missing piece of his skull. His eyes are still open. When I dream of him later, they blink, slowly. When I dream of him later, his hands reach for my throat, while his parents watch from the chambers of our courtroom.

His mother looks at me, sometimes, the memory from the court lobby projected into the stuff of my subconscious. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But I wish you were dead, instead.” 

 

\---

 

In the same way that the crash was not exactly my fault, it is not exactly my decision to leave. 

It is the heavy silence that weighs over my entire graduating class, as his name is not called. It is the angry hum that hushes over the room, when my name is. It is the raging disbelief in my father’s eyes when he had walked into my hospital room, it is the boy’s brains leaking onto the remnants of the sedan’s dashboard, it is _I wish you were dead._

My eighteenth birthday passes without fanfare or incident or celebration, and I begin to pack as soon as my shoulder heals. It is just after dawn when I steal down the stairs and into the kitchen. 

My father is sitting at the table, between me and the door. I am surprised. _Will he try to stop me?_

He folds his hands together, like he is shuffling cards. 

“Don’t you dare take my car,” he says. 

“I wasn’t going to,” I reply. 

“That’s good,” he says. 

Something about the way the words fit in his mouth feels unfinished. 

But I think perhaps it is simply my hope that he had more to say.


	3. Desert

It is possible that I am telling this story wrong. That I am projecting a falsehood, a life that was nothing more than a long stretch of something endless and full of hurt. But the truth is, as any truth is, complicated. Even murky waters shimmer in the sun; my childhood was much the same. 

I hold closely a collection of memories in which I know I was truly happy. The sweet smile of my mother, before she passed. The joy that had bubbled out of me like laughter, the day it had snowed so fiercely that school was called off. The sound of the ocean, deep watery breaths rolling in, and out again, soothing against the heat of the sun-yellowed sand.

In land-locked Utah, on the border of Wyoming, I cannot actually remember if my father ever took me to the sea. Maybe in a freer time, prior to my mother’s death, we had taken the trip. But it seems strange. The concept is difficult for me to grasp, imagining someone so coarse and heavy as my father in a place so beautiful, and calm. And where is he, in the memory? Is he there with me, at all? It is possible that I have made it up, entirely. 

But the ocean waves remain etched in my mind, all the same, along with the rest, and I let nothing taint them.

 

\---

 

I plod along the edge of the highway slowly, recalling each of these moments, fighting off the soreness of my calves and the dryness of my mouth with the remembrances of more pleasant things. I have been walking for a long time, I think. I wonder if I have made it over the border yet, from Utah to Nevada. I honestly have no idea how far it is, or how long it will take me. The sun beats down on the back of my neck and I roll my shoulders, the weak muscles there already tightening uncomfortably underneath the straps of my backpack. _It must be noon, at least._

When I pull out my phone to check, it is only ten-thirty. 

I rub sweat from my eyes and let a soft breath of disappointment escape me. _Positive thoughts,_ I encourage myself. _Good thoughts._ I know I will tire faster, if I beat myself down. 

I find a grassy spot off the road and pull out a thick pad of paper, something I had bought for school and then never used, and draw up a list to ease my mind and soothe the burning doubt knotting my stomach. My inventory consists of clothes that will last me about half a week, a bottle of water, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a bag of granola, and an apple. The money stuffed into my sock-- for safekeeping-- measures out to about fifty dollars. 

I am not prepared in the least, but considering I have almost never been outside of the boundaries of my hometown, it is certainly better than nothing. 

I am determined, now that I am away from the dark thunder eyes of my father and the disappointment that waterlogged me, that the small collection of sunlight memories I cling to so desperately will grow in number-- until I cannot remember them one by one. Until they are spilling out of my hands. 

I hike back up toward the highway and the dirt-paved make-shift sidewalk I’ve made of the ditches, and then I see it-- a cloud of dust, waving gently up into the air from the flat horizon. Cupping my hands above my eyes, I squint past the dry heat to make sense of what I’m seeing.

 _A car!_

Glinting toward me, almost a blur. Hope surges, and I imagine the bliss of it, sitting in the safety of the passenger’s seat, air conditioning cranked to full blast, cool on my skin. I jump, wave my arms, shouting joyfully as the vehicle approaches. The tires spin and flash in the sun.

It drives past me, and I choke on the dirt it sprays up in its wake.

 

\---

 

That is the first car. 

The second is much the same. The third slows at least, the driver looking me and my upturned thumb over briefly before speeding back up and vanishing down the long stretch of road-- a speck on the horizon in one minute, vanished completely in two. Spindly tumbleweed blows past, dragged unwillingly across the asphalt. 

I lose count after thirty minutes.

My feet begin to hurt before long, and I rest off the road, and eat some of the granola. It occurs to me for the first time, as I start walking again, that I might not actually reach a town before night falls. It also occurs to me that even if I do reach a town, I don’t have nearly enough money to pay for both more food-- which I will surely need-- _and_ lodging-- which I desperately want. Nervous, sharp fear surges up in me, and shame-faced, childish tears prick at the corners of my eyes. I rub them away, angry at my lack of planning and my own ignorance. Had I expected this to be easy? It had been silly to think that leaving home with so little would mean comfortable beds and a full stomach every night. _I will make this work._

I stop waving, though, and shouting, and sticking out my thumb, and above me the sky melts as the sun sinks down toward the edges of the earth.

 

\---

 

I have resentfully and rather anxiously resigned myself to sleeping under one of the high-branched bushes on the side of the road when a baby blue Prius appears at the corner of my vision. 

I hold out my thumb wearily, not bothering to stop to see if my last ditch efforts will pull in a result. I hold my breath, so I won’t gag on the dust the tires will leave behind. 

The small car purrs to a stop next to me. I actually startle when the young woman driving rolls down her window, and speaks to me. 

“Hi,” she calls out, not oblivious to my shock but not pausing to register it for long, either. Her voice is soft. She has a heart-shaped face, and dark almond eyes. “You know hitchhiking in Utah is illegal, right? Especially on the highway.” 

I blink rapidly. “Oh,” I say. “Sorry.”

My mind wanders off almost immediately, a bad habit picked up after the hours upon hours of aimless walking, struggling to come to terms with my ill-preparedness. Maybe she’s a cop, I think, undercover, come to fine and arrest me and whisk me off to jail. _I hope her car has air conditioning._ If I have to stay in the police station overnight, at least I’ll have a roof over my head. Desert nights are cold. 

“Don’t worry,” she says, bursting my bubble of imagination. “I’m not going to bust you.”

A slender hand snakes out of the open window, and she smiles.

“I’m Briseis,” she says. “Need a lift?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More of Briseis in the next chapter, and Achilles is t-minus two chapters. I'm going to try and update this pretty often, as most of it is already written and just going through the clunky editing machine.
> 
> Also a heads-up! Although Pat will be unharmed on the road in this story, hitchhiking is illegal [in some states] for a reason. People can be beautiful and kind, but they can also be awful, so this is just a little reminder to be very careful when you're traveling. 
> 
> If you ever find yourself wanting or having to hitchhike anywhere, make sure you are either with another person that you trust-- or if that's not possible, just stay alert and confident. Also PLEASE stay on smaller roads and off of highways! That's bad news and hardly anyone will ever stop for you; Pat doesn't know better.
> 
> [Here is an article highlighting 14 ways to safely hitchhike,](http://www.nomadicmatt.com/travel-blogs/hitchhike-across-united-states/) if you'd like more information! A quick note-- not to be overly critical, but it is way safer to hitchhike if you are a cis white guy, and can be extremely nerve-wracking otherwise. The article was written by a man ([Matthew Karsten,](http://expertvagabond.com/about/) an experienced traveler), and I think that he is slightly dismissive of how dangerous it can be to live on the road and depend on other people for your well-being. There are still a few very good pointers for hitchhiking safely in it, though, so check it out.
> 
> Safe travels!


	4. Briseis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings in this chapter for:
> 
> \- Nausea/vomiting   
> \- Anxiety   
> \- Panic attacks   
> \- PTSD 
> 
> Take care and stay safe. This fic gets a lot less heavy after this chapter.

Sliding into the passenger seat of the Prius is like submerging myself in a blissfully cold bath. Endlessly grateful to be out of the sun, I tip back against the headrest and exhale, gasping out _thank-you_ s.

I discover, however, soon enough, that even better than the cool breeze of the car’s AC over my skin is the driver, herself.

Briseis is from Illinois, a suburb just outside of Chicago. She has a warbling laugh, chocolate skin, a small silver stud set in the corner of her pretty, curved nose. It takes a few long minutes to break through the ice, both of us slightly awkward. It’s been awhile since she’s really talked to anyone, either. 

“I’ve been on the road for a few days now,” she explains, a tired smile touching the edges of her mouth. “A lot of time to myself.” She is driving to California, for a rally in San Francisco-- one she helped organize. When I ask her more about it, her eyes shine excitedly, and the weariness dissolves. 

“Well, our slogan goal is fighting domestic abuse against women,” Briseis says, “but it’s really just an all-inclusive convention tearing down the prejudices that have built up around the idea of feminism, you know?”

I don’t know, actually. The only rallies in my town that I had ever heard of were anti-abortion. Once, when I was younger, I had glimpsed them on the way home from school, picketing outside of a clinic. I had watched a woman hurry past them toward the door, her head bowed. From the interior of the bus I couldn't hear the words they jeered, but I had seen their mouths gape, and curl. Someone had thrown something, and I'd seen it bounce off her back. Then the bus had pulled away. It had been easier to breathe, away from them. 

Briseis has a soft-spoken eagerness to her, and it holds a liveliness I have rarely ever seen in anyone. It makes me glad, to see her face light up sweetly, as she talks. She tells me that she organized the conference herself. “That’s great,” I say, wanting her to continue, wanting to see more of the radiance in her smile, not wanting to disappoint her.

She ticks off a long list of speakers, important ones, apparently, that have accepted her invitation to speak. None of the names are ones that I recognize, and I feel frankly uneducated, listening to her and nodding along, her words well-formed, intelligent, thoughtful. She turns toward me slightly and shows me her t-shirt-- _this is what a feminist looks like--_ and when I tell her that I like it, she beams.

“We just ran out of the extras,” she says sympathetically. “I would give you one, otherwise.”

The conversation tips my way. I blunder through answers like a bulldozer. When she asks me where I’m headed, I say, vaguely, "the ocean". When she asks me where I’m from, I wave a hand ambiguously. 

“Utah. Uh, small town.”

“Yeah? A nice place?” 

I don’t know what to say. “Yeah.” 

Briseis glances over at me, not unkind, just curious. “So what are you doing out here, hitchhiking along a highway?”

I freeze up, my spine going rigid. 

“Uh,” I say softly. 

What do I tell her? My father, _don’t you dare take my car._ The courtroom lobby, _I wish you were dead, instead._

The boy. 

_Open eyes._

“I just needed to leave,” I say, my voice high, and Briseis nods, like she understands. 

My stomach turns over, knowing she doesn’t. 

 

\---

 

It is a gradual build, from there.

Briseis, chatting about her family. 

My father, _don’t take my car._

Briseis, sighing about the complications of political activism. 

Courtroom lobby, _I wish you were dead._

Briseis, almond eyes. 

The boy. 

_Open eyes._

 

\---

 

It is not her fault. I don’t see it, either. 

The coyote streaks in front of her Prius, a gray-brown blur over the black of the road, and Briseis slams on the brakes, gasping sharply. The tires squeal. The car lurches, groans. My mind blanks. Fear and panic and nausea blind me.

We stop, jolting to a stand-still. 

The coyote watches us, unharmed, from a few feet away. 

Briseis turns to me, breathless, smiling.

“Close one,” she says. 

I barely hear her.

I hear the glass shattering, instead, and the huff of the airbag. I can feel my nose bending again, snapping. I remember my breath, pressing out of my lungs. I am not in the passenger’s seat of Briseis’ car. I am in the passenger’s seat of my own, and it is crumpling around me, and I am crumpling with it.

 _His eyes are still open, they’re open, they’re open--_

I can see my brains, leaking out on the dashboard.

The coyote flits away, vanishing into the brush, and I seesaw out of the car, and vomit, all over the side of the road. 

It splatters thickly on the gravel. The smell rises heavy and pungent. I retch again, my whole body shuddering. 

“Oh, my god,” I hear Briseis say, from inside the car. I catch a spinning glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, blanching, her hand pressed over her mouth. “Oh, my god, I’m so-- I’m so sorry--”

 _It’s not your fault._ I want to tell her. I can’t breathe. I stagger away. 

I hear Briseis pull the car back, park halfway off the road. It is dusk now, and the flash of her hazards are bright in the dark. Her hand comes up to touch the back of my neck, as I wobble to my knees, and I flinch away without realizing it. 

She looks like she is about to cry. “Do you want me to call someone?”

I shake my head violently, heaving. 

“The police, an ambulance--?”

 _Nonononono._ I make a noise, like some kind of wild animal, and grab frantically for her wrist as she reaches for her phone. 

Her lip trembles. There are so many questions, and frightened frustrations, in her wet dark eyes. “Please let me help you,” she says.

“I’ll be fine.” My voice sounds far away. It doesn’t sound like mine.

When Briseis reaches for me this time, I let her. The sun vanishes entirely behind the mountains and the clouds, and we sit in the dark on the edge of the barren highway, her arms around my waist, my head against her shoulder. 

I don’t tell her about the crash. 

She doesn’t ask.

 

\---

 

I refuse to get in the car again. 

I feel awful, turning her down when she offers to drive me to the nearest town. To set me up in a hotel, at least, if I won’t go to the hospital.

She tries to give me money, and I hand it back. She asks if I want her to stay with me, a while longer, and I say _thank you, no._

I want to say, _I need to be alone._

But she is so kind. 

At last she hugs me tightly, kisses me on the cheek. “Take care,” she says, so fiercely, like she can will me better, if she tries hard enough. 

Then the Prius is scraping out of the gravel, and back onto the highway. I watch until she is out of sight, the two tiny receding patches of her car’s back lights blinking away into the murky blackness. 

I spend the night on a patch of tall grass, and I have never been so grateful to feel grounded. 

 

\---

 

The next morning I am back on my feet. 

The heat is thicker than usual. From twenty feet away the wind scoops pockets of dirt and dust and sand and tosses them up, twisted, miniature tornados rising into the air. The highway blurs as I peer down the road, melting away into a shimmering mirage. 

My feet are blistering in their tennis shoes. My one water bottle has been sucked dry. My lips begin to crack from the heat, then split open, and when I pass my tongue over them, I can taste the blood, the remnants of the vomit. 

The salt flats look like lakes, reflecting back toward the sun overhead. Over and over again my brain is fooled, sending me swerving hopefully toward them before crashing back to reality. I think about fresh water. Ice, running down the curve of my spine, settling at the small of my back. The mountains that surge up out of the earth seem to be swallowed by the salt, by the pure, white nothingness. That whiteness is everywhere. Even behind my eyelids, when I squeeze them shut to block it out.

Sometimes cars slow, a little. Sometimes they honk, and their cackled shouts shoot by me, carried too quickly by the wind. Sometimes, when the traffic is sparse, they stop, and their occupants call out kindly to me. But I would rather burn in the salt one hundred times over than set foot in another car. 

The boy’s open, glazed eyes are the eyes of every driver. I feel sick again. I stop looking. 

 

\---

 

The desert ebbs, for a little while, and I hit small pockets of gas stations and banks instead, tiny towns with big churches. Their rusted population signs swing halfway crooked on their posts, welcoming me with a half-hearted exhaustion that I feel mirrored in the ache of my body.

I fill up my water bottle in the first gas station's bathroom sink, and drink quickly, chugging it down. It is not enough. I refill it, then stick my head underneath the faucet. The water runs brown for a moment, into the drain, as the dirt peels from the back of my neck. The man waiting outside for me to finish pounds on the door, but I ignore him, hoarding the small pleasure of cold, running water for a minute more. I drink until I am bursting.

There are candy bars, and cheeseburgers, and it is like I have never tasted food before. I sit outside on the curb and gorge myself on the trough of treasure I’d bought, unable to stop the drool that oozes from the corner of my mouth as I bite down on a Milky Way. When I am finished, I lick my fingers clean, and watch tired tourists fill up their huge vans. They rub the wrinkles under their eyes and snap at their children. They are here one second, squealing back onto the road the next. It is strange, watching them buzz by. They escape so quickly. _I am still here._

The next gas station is the same, and for the next four days that continue that way, I think, _this is not so bad._

I forget how precariously I teeter on the ledge of _getting by._ I forget _temporary._

I have never had to truly budget myself, before. As a result, my saved money dwindles more quickly than it should. It lasts me a week, and I overspend unwittingly, on those huge, greasy meals that I scarf down and then forget. I do not quite seem to believe that I will run out-- until I am scraping the barrel at two dollars, and panic sets in. 

The last of my money is in quarters and dimes only. I feel the bottom of my stomach drop, as I count it out. When I leave the last shack-town, pushing out of the gas station door and back into the choking heat, the cashier blinks at me warily. I think, no one pities you, when you hit bottom. They are only afraid. It is so easy, to lose the things you have. It is so easy, when the only thing keeping your head above water is a wad of green bills, and a false sense of security.

I sleep on benches, and under bridges. I suck on pebbles, to ignore the sharp stabs of hunger. The salt is in my hair, my clothes, and it is dry and brittle. _Not like the ocean._ I hate it, like I have never hated anything before. At least it cannot get worse, I think.

In an exceptionally un-amusing twist of irony, a storm hits, an hour later. It is bright, and brilliant, and jolts the earth beneath my feet.

When he finds me, I grow to understand that he is the same way.


	5. Easy Lucky Free

_He smells like the sea._

It is the first thing that I notice. 

The second is the mop of curly blond hair, tied up with a rubber band, the wisps of bangs held off his forehead with a bandana. He is looking at me curiously. I think he has asked me a question. I don’t recall what he has said.

The dark clouds had gathered and erupted within a matter of minutes, a collision of pouring rain and heavy thunder, drumming in my ears. Terrified, but regaining some sense of thought, I’d backtracked to the closest bridge to take refuge. I huddle there now, drenched to the bone and shiver-shaking like a half-drowned animal, my backpack clutched to my wet chest. 

He had been the first person by in a half hour. 

His truck is graying white and old, rusting around the edges. He had seen me, somehow, as he’d passed, curled up under the bridge. He had stopped his car in the middle of the highway. Then put it in reverse, slowly crept back underneath the bridge, and pulled over.

He leans out of his truck, and all I think is, _he smells like the sea._

He speaks again, patiently, no doubt repeating what I’d missed him say the first time around. “Listen, you should--” Lightning cracks across the sky from outside of the belly of the bridge and it sharpens the side of his cheek, the hollow of his throat. He pauses until the thunder rolls past and then he says, nodding his head toward the open seat beside him, “Get in.” 

“What?” 

My voice cracks on the word and I flinch at the break instinctively. I do not know if he can hear-- or understand-- me, past the way my teeth clack together in a clumsy chatter. It had been such a hot day. _Where did this rain come from?_

“Get in,” says the blond boy again, “you’re soaked.” He says it as if it is the obvious thing to do. “Come on,” he says, more gently. “It’s okay.” 

My mind is fog-filled and waterlogged but that is not the reason I accept his offer. I lurch to my feet and struggle toward the truck like a moth to a flame; I do not care about his intentions, where he has come from or where he is going, whether the nausea will rise, violently, in me again, when the car pulls forward. He smells of the sea, and it is so familiar, and I-- 

I am tired, and kicked down, and out of options. 

My hands are shaking when I manage to clamber into the passenger seat. I keep my head down, breathing shallow, cold fingers gripping the sides of my seat until my knuckles are bone-white. 

Steady hands reach across me, slender fingers tug my seatbelt down. He buckles me in with a quiet _click._

“Safety first,” says the boy, and there is no hint of mockery or humor in his voice. Just a solemn calm. 

I watch him, half-numb, as he strips off his sweatshirt, and tosses it in my lap. 

“Take off your shirt and put this on, it’s dry. Take off your shoes, too. You can dry your socks over the heater vents, if you’d like.”

They are nearly commands but his voice is mild, and his face is open, and worried. The sweatshirt is soft when I slip it over my head. The heater is blessedly warm.

He doesn’t turn the engine back on. He simply drums his fingers lightly on the wheel while I curl up in the passenger seat, gnawing on my lower lip as the feeling begins to slowly seep back into my body. It hurts, pins-and-needles, but I don’t care. 

I’ve forgotten to say thank-you, I realize as my hair starts to dry, sticking up in cowlicks and tangles. 

It seems too late, to say it now. 

I sneak a look at the boy. He is watching the rain, pounding hard against the pavement outside of the underpass. He does not look like he is waiting for me to say anything. “Weird,” he mutters, so quietly that I’m not even sure if he’s speaking to me. “It was such a hot day.”

He turns his head. Our eyes meet, and I startle. Up close the irises are uniquely bright, deep green-gold. _Familiar._

“My name is Achilles,” he says. 

My voice is hoarse, rough from misuse. “Patroclus.”

Something in his face flickers, briefly. “Patroclus.” He sounds it out. _Pa-tro-clus._ “Hmm.” Soft, in the back of his throat, _hmm._

“Or Pat. It’s a hard name to-- to remember, for most people.” Because I am easy to forget. I feel his gaze back on me, as if he has heard me say what I was careful not to. I have always had a difficult time meeting others’ eyes. I feel as though it should make me nervous, to have him study me so closely. It does not. 

“I’ll remember,” he says. 

He peers out at the rain for a minute, frowning slightly at the sky. 

“I’m going to Lake Tahoe,” he says. “It’s a bit of a drive, but I’m fine if you come along. Unless you want me to drop you off before that.”

I have no idea where Lake Tahoe is but I want out, _out_ of the desert, so badly that I swallow back the dread of the trip itself. “No, that-- that sounds good. I’ll ride along.”

“Cool.” Achilles turns the keys, the engine purring to life, and my hands tighten on the edges of the seat once more. I think at first that he does not notice. But he speaks, after a few more moments. 

“You all right?” 

“Yes,” I say, past the nervous tightness of my mouth. My voice flutters weakly. 

Those eyes on me again. _Green-gold._ The dead boy’s eyes had been brown. 

Achilles’ voice is slow, carefully dropping each word into place. “Are you okay if I drive, now?” 

I breathe in, until my lungs cannot fill any more. I exhale, raggedly. “Yes.” 

“We could wait out the storm, if you’d like to--”

“No.”

Achilles is quiet, for a moment.

“Would you rather drive?” Achilles asks. 

I’m caught off-guard by the question; the surprise melts quickly into horror, imagining the wheel in my hands, the gas pedal beneath my foot. “No,” I say, loudly. “Just-- go.” 

He blinks at me cautiously, then reaches for the wheel, and pulls the car forward. My hands jump up to grip the dashboard in a stupidly thoughtless attempt to steady myself, even though he is gentle on the gas. He turns on the windshield wipers as we leave the safety of the bridge, and they fly back and forth furiously, as the rain pours down. 

He drives slow. Maybe half the limit. He keeps his hazards on. For a second I glimpse the shadowy outline of another car, passing us by on the opposite of the road, just as slowly. The rain is endless. I can hardly see anything in front of us. My heart pounds in my chest. 

“I've got a CD mix, if you wanna listen.” 

Achilles’ voice is calm. His gaze is glued to the highway, eyes squinting slightly to make out the signs.

“In the case to your left,” he continues. “You can put it in the player, if you want to.” 

The panic is dizzying. “Won’t it distract you?” 

“Nah, I don’t think so. I just thought it would be nice, to maybe take your mind off of-- you know, if you wanted to.” He doesn’t lift his eyes from the road, as he speaks. “We don’t have to listen to it. If it’d make you feel better to drive without music, that’s okay, too. Your choice.” 

I chew on my lower lip, and glance at my feet. The CD case lies just above my toes. The certainty of the decision swooping in my stomach, I stoop slightly and scoop it up. _On The Road Again!_ reads the messy scrawl across the top, and underneath, written slightly smaller, _Summer Roadtrip 2006._

I slip it into the player, and the first track begins to play, quiet guitar drones and soft-beat drums. The singer’s voice is sad, and wavers. 

“Bright Eyes,” says Achilles happily, mouth curved in a smile. I can tell that he’s pleased, that I’ve taken him for his word. “I love these guys-- this is like, my favorite song, seriously.” 

_Listening for patterns in the sound of an endless static sea--_

“You okay?” he asks for the second time, letting his eyes leave the road at last, to flicker over me. 

I realize I’ve stopped clutching at the dashboard. 

I think of the boy, with the hole in his head and the endless stare of his eyes. 

I look at Achilles, drumming slender fingers on the steering wheel, murmuring along to Bright Eyes. 

“Yeah,” I say, and I am surprised that it’s true. 

He catches me staring at him, squinting like I am trying to see inside of his head to understand how he’s set me at ease, and I flush. But before I can look away, he grins, radiant in the storm-gray shadows of the car, and turns his attention back toward the road. _“There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free,”_ he sings. 

I am exhausted, and his voice is smooth, and pretty. I don’t remember when, but I fall asleep, my forehead resting against the cool pane of the window and my cheek resting against the heel of my hand. The storm clouds part to let the moon creep into the center of the sky. The passing car headlights flash past like meteors. 

I dream of the ocean. 

Vast, and beautifully endless.


	6. Achilles

When I wake, Achilles is still driving, and he looks unfairly awake and unfairly good for someone who has been on the road for a week. Dark coffee in a white, plasticky cup steams next to him, half-empty, the rich smell intoxicating. 

I stir, pushing myself up from where I’ve slumped down in the seat and readjusting my seatbelt, and he grins at me. 

“Good morning,” he says, as I crack my mouth into a wide yawn, one hand smearing sleep from my eyes. “We’re about halfway through Nevada, four hours away from Tahoe.” 

My heart leaps in my chest. _After Nevada, California._ Already, I am so close to open water.

A sign flashes by, catching my attention, wooden stilts propping up an enormous billboard. _Save A Life,_ I read, in big, flashy letters. _Don’t Drive Drowsy._

Biting my lip, I look at Achilles anxiously. He doesn’t look tired; the flame in his eyes is as brilliant as I remember it from the night before. “Nebraska,” I echo, all the same. “You drove all the way through the rest of Utah-- overnight?” 

He laughs, sweetly. “I pulled over and napped for an hour outside of Salt Lake City. I don’t need much sleep. I stopped to get coffee and I was gonna get you some, too, but I wasn’t sure if you drank--”

He pauses, then, and his eyes flicker to mine briefly. There is a serious depth to them that hadn’t been there, a few seconds ago. 

“You don’t need to worry,” he says, softer. “I’d never put you in danger.” 

I don’t know what made him say it. Maybe the nervous flutter of my hands, or the way that I’d swallowed, pushing back the anxious buzz that had begun to claw up, like an animal, from my gut.

“I’m gonna drive safe,” he says. “I promise. Trust me, okay?” 

I nod, hesitant but reassured, and Achilles settles back in his seat. 

On the CD player, Bright Eyes has been replaced with Johnny Cash. Achilles hums a little, fiddling with the volume. “I love this song,” he says. “You know-- this is probably my favorite.” 

I blink a little. “I thought-- you said that about the song yesterday.” 

“Oh, yeah, well.” He seems unbothered, head nodding along to the strumming of the guitar. “They’re all my favorite. Every song on this mix. It’s the only one I have, see, so I have to love them all equally.” 

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” I say, and he mock-scowls at me, amusement peeking through the light in his eyes. 

“Fun sucker,” he says, but then the song’s intro fades out, and Achilles takes up the melody, apparently finding it very important that he proves to me just how much Johnny Cash resonates with his soul. 

_“Of travel life I’ve had my share, man,”_ he sings, furrowing his brow and twisting his mouth to perfect his imitation of Cash’s throaty melancholy. _“I’ve been everywhere-- I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Arizona--”_

He does, somehow, know every word, and the happy curl of his mouth and the breathless ramble of his voice makes me smile. I hide it behind my hand self-consciously, half-hoping he won’t notice, but his eyes are quick, and so bright, and when he sees it, he smiles back through the chorus, wide and toothy. 

A kind of full warmth spreads up from my chest, suddenly, as Achilles sings all the way through Cash’s rapid list of cities, playing an imaginary piano over the steering wheel. 

I don’t understand it-- not yet, at least. 

But I don’t try to, either. 

 

\---

 

We drive through the barren Nebraskan road for about another hour, and the CD plays almost all the way through the fifteen-song track list. Achilles pops it hastily out of the player before the last song begins. “I don’t like that one,” he says, avoiding my questioning gaze. The tips of his ears are pink. 

“I thought they were all your favorite,” I tease, unusually bold. 

“It's an exception,” Achilles replies, smacking my arm. He smiles, but it is tight around his eyes. It is the first and only lie he will tell me, although I don’t know it then. 

Curiosity prickles under my skin as I glance at the CD, tucked away safely in its case, but I let it go, and look out the window instead, watching the rocky stretch of land outside. It is a drowsy, continuous pattern of brown-orange earth rolling past, and the smooth repetition soothes me nearly to sleep again. I’m already nodding off when Achilles announces, triumphantly, “Breakfast!”

I startle upright, drooping eyes flicking open. He’s pulled the truck onto an off ramp, heading toward a small collection of buildings. “Hmm?” 

"Are you hungry?"

 _God, yes._ My mouth nearly starts watering at the very idea of food. But then I think about the measly two dollars in the bottom of my pocket, and I feign nonchalance. “Just a little,” I say. 

My stomach growls, loud, and Achilles snickers. 

“We’ll stop somewhere and grab a bite,” he says. “My treat.”

I protest immediately, feeling frantic. “I’m already in debt to you,” I tell him.

“Everyone’s in debt to somebody,” he replies, shrugging. “Whether or not you hold it over them when they still need you-- that’s what matters, yeah?” 

“But--” I stammer. “Look, you’re not obligated to take care of me. I dug myself into this hole--”

“And there’s no way you can climb out again,” he interrupts. That somber depth is back in his eyes. “Not on your own.” 

I look away and out the window, frustrated. 

“I’m not obligated to take care of you,” Achilles says. “But I’m not letting you starve, either, so. There.”

He says it with a stubborn set of his jaw; his mouth pouts, firmly. I am not sure if he understands the gravity of what he is doing, everything that he has already done, hauling me back from the precipice. I want to ask him if he would do the same for anyone else. I am afraid of his answer. 

“Thank you,” I say, weakly. The words are too small, and gratitude and guilt well up inside of me. My eyes mist over, and embarrassed, I drop my head to hide it. “I don’t know if-- I can’t repay you.” 

“You don’t have to, Patroclus,” says Achilles, and there it is again, _Pa-tro-clus._

He says it so deliberately. He says it the same way he says everything, like it matters. 

When he says it, it is as if I have never heard it spoken aloud before. The feeling is uncanny, and familiar, all at the same time. 

We park at a crummy hole-in-the-wall pancake place, next to a rest stop in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska, and something in my chest unfurls each time he says my name, like one of the desert flowers on the highway mediums, that only opens up when it feels the sun on its leaves.


	7. The Radio; Part I

True to Achilles’ word, it takes us four more hours to reach Tahoe. 

I am concerned at first that it will be awkward between the two of us, uncomfortable lapses in conversation dragging on for painful minute upon minute-- but I am surprised to find that the exact opposite is true. We play word games, guess each other’s middle names, twenty questions. We say whatever comes to mind. There is somehow too much to say, and not enough time to say it. There are too many things to remember, and not enough memory to hold them. 

He puts me at ease, with his effortless smile, and his eyes ablaze. He is sometimes somber and surprisingly hard to read-- but he forms every sentence like it is the most important ever to leave his mouth. I believe him, when he speaks, and in return, I am not afraid to to tell him what I think. I do not worry that I will say the wrong thing. I do not stumble over my words, or overanalyze them, the way that I have always done. I still think of the dead boy. But I am not afraid. How could I be, when he is like pure sunlight? What do I have to be scared of, with him next to me? 

By the time we pull into North Lake Tahoe, I cannot remember what it was like, to be on the road alone.

The town is small, but bursting with tourists and energy. In the distance, the mountains loom over the shingled rooftops. “If it was winter, we could ski down,” Achilles says, grinning. I picture it, the two of us alone up there, snow piled high, the wind squalling around us. From the cliff face the town below would be ant-like, microscopic. I am immediately and endlessly relieved that it is July. 

The truck slowly trundles its way through the busy streets, cars crawling at the same snail-pace all around us. _Vacation season--_ and we are in the midst of it. Achilles tells me not to worry. “The campground is much quieter,” he says, so dismissively that I don’t realize what he’s actually alluded to until a minute or two later. 

“Campground?” I echo, when it hits me. 

Achilles glances over. “Did I forget to mention that? I’ve got a campsite rented out.”

“And--” I struggle to piece the phrase together, in some way that won’t sound strange. “I’m...going with you, there?”

He shrugs. “Only if you want to. No pressure.” 

_If I want to? Is it an invitation or a dismissal?_ I am sitting there in stricken silence, trying to pick through his words and find the answer, when Achilles hums thoughtfully, frowning at the half-empty tank. 

“I'm gonna fill up,” he decides, turning into a gas station. “Better safe than sorry. My wallet’s in the back, wanna run in and grab a few snacks? You can get whatever you want, I eat anything and everything.”

I find said wallet and clamber out of the car without protest, but my mouth twists as I jog toward the station, guilt beginning to curdle in my stomach again. The sunny openness he had brought out in me during the drive dissolves amidst the unease, and a little voice in the back of my head stirs and wakes up, feeding off of the doubt. 

_Are you taking advantage of him?_

_You don’t want to be a burden, do you?_

_Why hasn’t he dumped you on the side of the road yet?_

_What are you still doing here?_

I wander my way through the gas station’s racks, trying to wrestle control of my fears. He had said that I didn’t need to repay him. He had said he would take me to Tahoe. 

_Well, this is Tahoe,_ the voice pushes gruffly, sounding uncannily like my father. _Jesus, don’t drag it out, Pat, get off at your stop. You should know when to call it quits._

I glance out of the window toward the truck; Achilles is sliding back into the driver’s seat. Gnawing anxiously at my bottom lip and not wanting to hold him up, I grab a few random snacks and hurry toward the check-out, barely registering the total as I hand over the money. _I can’t wait for him to just drop me somewhere,_ I think as I hurry back toward the truck. _I’ll just say, I’ve overstayed my welcome. I’ll say, thank you, but you’ve done enough. You’re here in Tahoe, and I’ve got to get to Cali. It's not fair of me to hang around, to depend on you. I’ll catch a ride with another car._

I swing open the passenger door, my resolve set. “Achilles--”

Achilles is sitting stiffly in the driver’s seat with his hand loosely draped over the steering wheel, his head bowed. 

He does not look at me. 

I don’t think he has really heard me.

The radio is on. 

_“...the weeks ahead we’ll have a series of conversations about how U.S. troops may begin to leave Iraq--”_

“Achilles,” I say, louder, something sparking in me, suddenly and fiercely wanting to shake out the blankness in his expression, and he startles, blinking like he has never seen me before. 

_“--have lost more than 2,530 lives in the occupation-”_

Something snaps down over his eyes. He turns the radio off. 

The spark flickers out, and I swallow back everything I have planned to say.

“I got--” I glance down at the bags in my hands. “Gummy bears,” I say, weakly. 

“Sweet,” Achilles replies. When he turns back to me, he is smiling, bright and dazzling. There is no hint of the tension that had been in him before. “Good enough for you, good enough for me.” 

He has me toss him the candies from the passenger’s seat while he drives, to see how many he can catch in his mouth. 

He does not turn the radio back on again. 

I do not ask him if he really wants me there with him. 

For some reason--

He looks at me like he knows. _What a silly question, Pat._

And after that, I don’t need to. 

 

\---

 

But still-- 

There is something else there. 

Always behind his eyes, held on the back of his tongue. It is there openly, when his gaze falls on the radio, and so it is not as if he is hiding it from me, exactly, whatever it is. Maybe-- he is simply waiting for me to ask. 

We are alike, in that regard. I know he has a question, too, one that he bites back when the engine splutter startles me, when he nears too close to the back of the car stopped in front of him and I shrink into my seat, like I can push his truck back myself. 

I wish he would ask. 

I think, he wishes I would ask, too.

 

\---

 

Looking back on it now--

There are many things we should have said, far earlier than we did. If I could do it all over again-- 

What a funny phrase. 

_If I could do it all over again--_

As if I never have. 

 

\---

 

Dusk is weighing heavy in the air when Achilles slows the truck at the end of an unpaved road. 

“All right!” he crows, cutting the engine. “Home sweet home. Let’s go, Pat, help me get all the stuff out of the back!”

 _Home sweet home_ turns out to be a patch of dirt, some trees, and a small cleared gap that leads to a tiny beach in the distance, the water beyond it black underneath the approaching dark. 

_All the stuff_ turns out to be one sleeping bag, a teeny tent, a stack of wood, and a pack of matches.

“Oh-- and--!” Achilles gestures crazily. His face is flushed with excitement. “There’s some more food in there, too, in a cooler! We have to remember to put it in the bear locker, though, it can’t stay in the car overnight.”

I stare at him. _Bear locker?_ But then he’s dancing back toward the car, chattering about where we can put the tent and how much firewood we should use and and hopping from one foot to the other like he’s stepping on coals. _Bears!_ I smile. _Very funny._

We pile everything in the middle of the patch of dirt. Achilles immediately begins tugging the tent out, tossing a stack of metal poles my way. 

“Help me put these together, okay?” 

“Uh-- yeah. Sure.” _I'm sure I can figure this out._

Achilles assembles his half in under a minute, then sets them carefully over the collapsed tent and bounces off to the cooler, rummaging through it like a kid under a Christmas tree. “We can cook sausages over the fire tonight!” he calls to me. 

“Cool,” I call back, trying to untangle the mess I’ve somehow made. 

“I wonder if gummy bears melt if you put them in a fire." I hear him pause in thought, then snicker. “Like little piles of jello-- oh, hell yeah! I remembered to bring the marshmallows.” 

“Hm. Cool.” The metal poles in my hands are an enigma. I try to jam them together haphazardly and pinch my fingers red in the process. 

“And the roasting forks, thank god-- aw, no graham crackers, though, so s’mores are out. Hey, can you give me a hand with the--”

“Uh, Achilles?”

He glances toward me, surprised. I hold up the twisted poles in defeat. 

“Don’t laugh,” I warn.

He snorts, scrunches up his face, mouth curving up in a little _u_.

_“Don’t laugh--”_

He cackles, and I drop the poles and charge him, even as I burst into laughter myself. He is infectious, all of him, the soles of his tennis shoes flashing up white at me as he runs, kicking up dirt, skidding as he turns toward the path to the sunset-sky, and the dark water.

I fall behind quickly-- _he is so fast--_ but I can still hear him shout, wordlessly, as we break past the trees and out onto the beach, expelling a wild kind of war whoop that echoes across the lake. Without slowing he kicks off his shoes, wades into the water. “Ah, shit!” He whirls toward me, where I’m pulling off my own shoes. “It’s freezing, Pat!” 

I join him, all the same, gasping as the water laps up at my knees, and wriggling my toes into the cold sand. “That’s what you _get--”_ I splash him, and he shrieks, “for laughing.” 

“I was laughing _with_ you.” Achilles grins. “You’ve never been camping, have you?” 

“Never.”

He lays his hand over his heart. “You wound me. I am personally _wounded._ Pat, really, _never?”_

“Never!” I repeat, amused. “Achilles, I grew up in the middle of Utah.”

“Not an excuse! I’ve camped in Utah before, it was--” 

“Boring?”

“Flat,” he admits, and I laugh again. _I cannot stop smiling._

He takes my hand. 

“Come on,” he says. “You’ve got a world to rediscover.”

 

\---

 

He untangles the poles, but we set up the tent together. He builds the fire, but he lets me light it. He coaches me through the cooking, his hand on my wrist as he shows me how to turn the fork without letting the sausage slide off into the embers, and after we’ve stuffed ourselves full of both dinner and dessert, we discover that gummy bears do indeed melt. 

I almost nod off curled up by the fire, the comforting warmth lulling my eyelids closed; Achilles touches my shoulder and puts the fire out, ignoring my drowsy protests-- _sorry, not letting you sleep out here, you’ll freeze._

The sleeping bag, unzipped, is barely big enough for the both of us, but Achilles doesn’t seem to mind. 

“In the morning we’ll swim,” he whispers, flicking off the flashlight. “You’ll love the lake, Pat, it’s so clear-- like crystal. They say you can see all the way to the bottom, even from the middle…”

I fall asleep to the sound of his voice.

 

\---

 

Then, in the middle of the night, I wake abruptly. 

For a few moments, I forget where I am. Blinking slowly and trying to make sense of my surroundings, I turn my head, and see Achilles, his chest rising and falling easily, with each breath. It is too dark to make out the details in his face, but I can discern his profile, the curve of his nose and lips stark against the rest of the blackness. _I wish I could see him more clearly. I wish--_

_Thud._

I jump, inhaling sharply, my head snapping toward the sound. There is silence for a few seconds afterward, and I hold my breath, hoping that I’ve imagined it-- but then, a gruff panting, the heavy sound of dragging footsteps, and my heart leaps into my throat.

“Achilles!” I shake him. 

He mutters something, and tries to roll away from me, pulling at our shared sleeping bag.

“There’s--” I shake him again, my voice high pitched, a vehement whisper. “There’s someone in our campsite!” 

His eyes crack open blearily, and he squints at me. “Jus’abear, Pat.” 

His words are nearly unintelligible. “What?” 

“Bear,” Achilles mumbles, louder, clearly annoyed at being woken. 

A chill goes through me and I tense with sudden fear. _Oh my god._ “There are-- actually bears here? I thought you were joking!”

“Th’more you know.” Achilles yawns, turns over. “Go back t’sleep.”

“There’s a _bear_ in our campsite and you want me to _sleep?”_ My voice is still a whisper, but the panic in my words is growing.

“Mmm.” 

“It’ll eat us!” 

“Nah.” 

“Achilles,” I hiss, “we are going to _die!”_

Achilles flips back toward me. Amusement has replaced the irritation in his sleepy green eyes. “Black bear, Pat. Harmless, ‘less it's got babies.”

“Y-yeah? You sure?”

“Yep. M’sure.” 

Outside of our tent, I hear something clang. The bear grunts, whines.

“Hah, bitch,” Achilles mumbles. “Food’s inna locker, whaddya gonna do ‘bout it?” 

Apparently nothing much, as it turns out. It paces around our site with an aimless gait, snuffling as it goes. I lie back down, as quietly as I can, my heart still thumping away rapidly in my chest. 

_Please leave,_ I silently will the bear. Harmless or not, having a huge furry animal huffing and pawing a few feet away from me with just a strip of fabric between us is not helping my fear recede. _What if it’s so hungry, it eats us? What if it gets angry that the food is locked up, and shreds our tent?_

Achilles is silent, his eyes closed. I think he has fallen asleep again, until he rolls over toward me, so close that we’re pressed together. He lays his head down on my chest, and slings his arm around my waist. “You’re overthinking again,” he says, voice muffled against my shirt, “aren’t you?”

I laugh, breathlessly, and I feel the curl of his smile beneath my breastbone. “Sorry.” 

“You always are,” Achilles murmurs. “You don’t have to be, you know.”

His weight and warmth is comforting. I breathe out, slowly, and curl cautiously into him, his hair soft underneath my chin. 

“Achilles?” I ask. 

“Patroclus," he replies. 

I smile, and close my eyes. 

“Nevermind,” I whisper. “Good night.”


	8. Tahoe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why this chapter took me forever, it's not even that long...
> 
> I am sorry about it being late, though. I moved back into the city and I'm living on my own for the first time, so there has been a lot on my mind. But hopefully I can set aside time for writing again soon.
> 
> I hope everyone's been having a wonderful fall so far.

The sunrise has never seemed quite as beautiful as it does rising over Lake Tahoe. Pinks and pale blues and quiet orange-reds melting into soft greens, so breathtaking that I cannot even find it in me to berate Achilles for waking me at such a ridiculous hour, in order to see it. 

I could not have berated him for waking me at all, with the gentle voice he used, and the soft touch of his fingers on my arm. A surge of sleepy warmth had welled up inside of my chest, as he had apologized, buzzing with energy-- _you have to see this._

I would have liked to wake with Achilles still draped over me, his breath even and synced with the rise and fall of my own chest. I would have liked to have seen the soft curve of his closed eyelids, purpled with the tinge of exhaustion, to breathe in the scent of his hair, tangled over his forehead. It surprises me, the thought of it. But as it is, I do not have much time to contemplate it, with Achilles’ insistence-- _there is nothing like it._ And so I leave the warm confines of the tent, and watch the sun rising over Tahoe. 

We sit side by side, perched on a dry driftwood log with our ankles dipped into the cold water, watching in a soothing silence as the colors blur and blend together. The sun pools slowly into the sky, inching up over the sharp mountain peaks. Occasionally Achilles stirs from his spot next to me, flicking his feet and watching the currents he makes, trembling over the water’s still surface. But we do not speak. And everything around us is still, and quiet, other than birdsong, echoing from the pines branching out from the end of the beach. The silence is a comfort, if an unfamiliarly strange one, after being trapped for so long in the busy fast paced drum of highways and off-ramps. 

“What do you think?” Achilles asks at last, when the curtain of morning has lifted entirely. He looks hopeful, nervous even, as if he has single-handedly planned and conducted the entire concept of the rising sun, of dawn itself. 

But I am honest, all the same. I do not know how not to be, with him. “You were right,” I tell him. “There’s nothing like it.”

There is nothing like him, either. But that, I think, is something that I should keep to myself. 

It is something he must already know, anyhow. 

 

\---

 

We swim the rest of the morning in the cold glacier-lake, keeping cool when the sun begins to beat down more fiercely past daybreak. To my delight and awe, Achilles hadn’t been exaggerating the night before-- the lake is incredibly, impossibly clear. We dive down to collect the pretty smooth stones at the bottom, resurfacing only when we empty our lungs. Kayaks and canoes slip by us over the lake's calm surface and we wave and call out to their occupants, watching their paddles dip into the water as they glide onward, gentle _v-_ shaped ripples cascading from the hull of their boats. 

The afternoon goes too quickly, time tumbling by in a blur. We snack on granola and the rest of the gummy bears and then he is grabbing my hand, pulling me down to the beach again, crashing through the water until it is deep enough to dive. He never looks back. We both know that I will follow, regardless.

“Why the ocean?” he asks me suddenly, as we are floating belly-up, watching the white winged birds soar overhead. “If you don’t mind me asking.” 

The question takes me by surprise. I chew on my lower lip, studying the clouds and formulating my answer. It isn’t that I’ve always loved the sea. I hardly remember it, if the memory I’ve kept locked in my mind is true at all. 

“I don’t know,” I say. “Only-- it feels like there are some things that I am supposed to do. Not like a bucket list, more of-- of a need. Seeing the ocean-- I want to, but I also need...” 

I trail off, my face going hot. I have never tried to explain it to anyone, and it sounds ridiculous, even to my ears. 

But Achilles hums, softly. “I know,” he says.

 

\---

 

The days pass. I do not know when Achilles is planning to leave. I do not care to ask. It is like living a dream, in Tahoe, fuzzy and wonderful and somehow not-quite-real, and I am afraid that asking will break the spell. That I will wake-- stuck back beneath an overpass, beneath the covers of my bed in Utah. Without him.

And-- I do not know when it happens. But at some point, life with Achilles becomes simple and routine, and then, so quickly that it feels as if it has always been that way, Achilles himself becomes just as familiar. 

I am not sure how to explain it. But when I wake in the mornings, and turn my head beneath the soft warmth of our shared sleeping bag, it feels only natural to see him next to me, blond curls spilling over his pillow. It feels like there is no other place I should be. As though I have been waking up next to him for years. 

We share pieces of ourselves, with each other. Questions we have never been able to answer, secrets we have not told anyone else. Sometimes at night, we lie underneath the sleeping bag, without setting up the tent. Just us, and stars, overhead. Nothing trapping us in. Nothing holding us down. 

On especially clear nights, I ask him to show me the constellations, even though he has pointed them out at least three times already. 

Other nights, we simply talk. 

_Guess what I’m thinking about,_ Achilles will say, sometimes, and I guess: 

_Johnny Cash._

_The spotted fawn we saw, hiking._

_Figs._

His eyes open wide in surprise, and amusement. “How did you know I like figs?” 

“Maybe you mentioned it once,” I murmur, abruptly uncomfortable. The feeling cuts like a knife to the gut. I don’t know why I’d guessed it, only that it had seemed obvious, once I’d thought of it. Achilles nudges me with his arm, unaware. 

“Well, good one. Your turn, Pat.” 

“Guess what I’m thinking about,” I say, his carelessness intoxicating, and Achilles grins. 

“The ocean,” he says. “It’s always the ocean, with you.” 

I am out of my element in this high-pined forest, in the clearing of the beach. But there are so many things, that he teaches me. How to build a campfire, so it will burn longer. How to set up a bear-bag. How to adjust my pack, so it doesn’t dig into my shoulders. How to shake out my shoes for scorpions. _Watch this,_ he says, his grin wide and bright, and he wades knee high into the lake, and scoops out a crayfish, its claws waggling. _Watch this,_ he says, his laugh infectious, and he plucks up a strand of grass and sets it between his lips and thumbs, blowing sharply to make a fluting whistle. _This,_ he says, wrapping my foot for a strain, _and this,_ he warns, one hand warm against my chest as a snake writhes past us, _and this,_ he whispers, breath puffing warm against my ear as we lie close together under the naked sky, and he braces himself up on one elbow, tips his head back, pale throat and marble profile, and howls, softly. 

In the distance, the answering, yipping howl of a coyote.

His eyes light up, studying the stars above, imagining, maybe, the wild dog itself, loping through the brush, ears pricking at his cry. 

“Incredible,” he breathes, “right?” 

“Incredible,” I repeat. 

But I am looking only at him. 

 

\---

 

Light hasn’t yet spilled over the edges of the dry earth when he wakes me the next day. 

His hand touches my shoulder. “Pat,” he says, in that voice he has begun to use with me in the early reaches of the morning, whenever he gets up first-- apologetic, but brimming with that hushed kind of excitement. “Pat, get up.” 

I make some kind of disparaging noise. It is warm, beneath the sleeping bag. Even in the safely secured igloo of the tent I can feel the frigid air lurking outside, waiting to envelop me.  


I stay where I am, enjoying the feeling of Achilles’ palm, passing gently over my back. I imagine the feeling of his hand on my cheek. Curving down my neck, tracing the dips of my collarbone. What would it be like, to taste his fingertips, if he pressed them to my mouth? 

“Patroclus,” Achilles chides, and I flush into my pillow, glad, for the first time, that he cannot see my thoughts. 

“Wha’time izzit?” I mumble. 

“Time to get _up.”_ He enunciates the last word, punctuates it with a harmless jab to my side. I yelp, albeit sleepily, then groan, burrowing further into the bag. I peek out of the top, regarding him warily. 

He has a glint in his eyes, mischievous. His hands inch toward my feet. 

“Don’t you dare--” I warn, but it’s too late. He seizes the ends of my sleeping bag and yanks, hard, crowing victoriously as I tumble out, shrieking. 

_“Achilles--!”_

He bounds forward, presses his forehead to mine, hands braced over me. “Good morning,” he says, all light and laughter. And then he is gone, scampering out of the tent. “Come on!” Close enough for me to trace every line in his body one minute, so far away I can only hear the faint pitch of his voice the next. 

That is the way it is, with him.

By the time I am dressed, seesawing my way out of the tent with groggy eyes and the taste of sleep in my mouth, he is packing the trunk of his truck.

Something seizes up and tightens in my throat. It is like a slap in the face; my weariness dissolves, but the bitter taste in my mouth remains. 

“You’re leaving?” 

He turns, the cooler in his hands and the smile light on his face. “I only rented out the site for a week.” 

_A week!_ The words steal the breath straight from my mouth, flatten me. Only a week with him? I could have sworn it was longer, that time had stretched. Years, ages. The burn in my chest intensifies; it is harder to breathe.

The questions boil inside of me, as he slides the cooler into the truck. _Where are you headed next? Where will you drop me off? Will this be the last time--_

“I’m going with you,” he says, turning back toward me. 

I stare at him, stammer. “You're-- what?”

“To California.” His eyes are charged, his body wired. “I’ll go-- I mean, we can take my truck, if you’d like. We can explore whatever you want to, we can camp--”

I laugh sharply, to hide my trembling, rising hope. “With-- me?” I’ve already proven myself readily worthless at it. “Achilles--” 

“We’ll go together, we’ll see the coast together.” He is intent, eager. As if it is the best idea that he has ever had. As if it is meant to be, and he is just understanding its purpose now. 

“We’ll see the ocean,” he says. “Are you in or out, Pat?” 

I smile, and it comes easily, this time. 

“In,” I say. “In, a thousand times.”


	9. There Is A Light

The very first song on Achilles’ road trip CD is something happily melancholy that I’m not sure he actually know all the words to, but that he seems to mimic very well anyway-- _it’s The Shins, Pat, you don’t know The Shins, are you kidding?_ The second is Counting Crows-- Rain King-- followed by-- OK Go? He tells me when I ask the first time but I forget immediately, and am too embarrassed to ask again. 

Then there is Bright Eyes, and then there is Johnny Cash, and then the CD blurs together, the plucking of strings and soft drumbeats melting over me. He skips the last song again and again, and eventually I am used to it, hearing all fourteen songs in their respective order and then watching him flush and fumble over the fifteenth, the player never getting in more than two notes before Achilles skips back to number one, and starts all over. 

It would be untrue to say that I am not curious. At first I think maybe it is some silly, guilty-pleasure band-- a heavy metal secret, something he is hiding for the sake of embarrassment-- but there is a set to his jaw and an insecurity to the nervous curl of his mouth that has nothing to do with shame. Like the pit in my chest where the dead boy still rots away, aching when there is too much silence and tapping at my ribcage when there is not, I know better than to ask. 

I let him have his secret. He has let me have mine. 

 

\---

 

Our days on the road span out and lengthen in to a week. We eat at whatever greasy fast food chains we pass by, and sleep parked off of the side of the road under that single sleeping bag, in the bed of his truck. On my own, the very idea of living this way would have been daunting. With him, it is only another adventure, another wild thing to throw myself into, headfirst. 

I am learning all the words to the songs on the mix CD, the bits and phrases that Achilles likes best. And in between the pauses of the track list and the lulls when Achilles snaps the player off, I am learning, gradually, even more about him. 

He hates being cooped up. Can’t stand small spaces, needs room to breathe, he says. He ran long distance on his high school’s track team for a few years but was never one for rules or regulations or people telling him what to do-- so he quit a year in, to run on his own. 

He plays guitar. 

There’s an old, well-worn acoustic that’s he’s lugged along, cradled in the backseat. He strums away at it when we stop each night, songs that I think I know-- but there’s no possible way I could have heard them before. He’s written them himself. 

He plays wonderfully. Somehow I knew he would.

Eventually the topic turns to his family. He had been raised on the coast of Washington, memories abundantly freeing: fishing trips, camping, backpacking. His mother is absent but his father is kind, with a quirky sense of humor and a deep love for human nature. He is a little rugged, Achilles tells me, a modern mountain man with laugh lines creased around his mouth like parentheses. He had made sure that Achilles spent as much time in the outdoors as he did in the cities, and was overjoyed when his son took to it like a fish to open water. 

I understand now how Achilles can afford to have me along-- his father has funded this trip, entirely. “He wanted me to go,” Achilles says, a little awkwardly, like he knows he is lucky but isn’t quite sure what to do with it. “I think he always wanted to do something like this, when he was my age. This trip, it’s-- well, you know. Filling his shoes, and all that. Living his life better than he did.” 

I can hear the longing of my own father in my head. What he would have given, for me to have been like Achilles. To be adventurous, outgoing, outspoken. To be-- _not_ me. 

I swallow back the misplaced bitterness and watch Achilles talk instead, his eyes half-closed lying on the bed of the truck next to me, recounting his childhood. His toned arms stretch out beneath his head and he smiles, remembering. His father, apparently, had actually remodeled their home into a wilderness summer camp for a few years when Achilles was still growing up. “There were kids everywhere,” Achilles recalls. “All the time, all my age. I was always surrounded.” 

I can picture it easily. Achilles, a younger Achilles, round-faced, sharp-chinned, golden hair curling over his ears, hanging loose and tangled. Achilles plucking away at his guitar in the midst of children who surround him, listening wide-eyed to his music. Achilles racing a flock of scrape-kneed boys to the ocean, brimming with excitement as he pulls ahead. Achilles telling them stories. Pointing out constellations. Saying, _guess what I’m thinking about._

I wonder what it would have been like, for me to have been there, living in the midst of his light. To have known him as a child, at eleven, or twelve. I had never really had any friends. It seems like some kind of heavenly reviere, a part of another world, impossible, magical, everything I had ever wanted. 

“It was crowded,” Achilles says, twisting his mouth a little distastefully, and I am reminded of his carelessness, his entitlement.

No one has ever tried to take anything from him, I think. 

I did not assume him to be a particularly observant person; people as beautiful as him rarely are. But he notices my discomfort, and my resentful envy, as it manifests itself in the tight curl of my body language, and he falters. In the middle of a story about rocky ocean crags and cliff-diving, he bites back his words, and blushes, looking away. 

His sudden shame makes me feel silly and unkind. It’s not his fault he grew up well off. Who am I to begrudge him that? Would I wish for it to be reversed? For him to be in my position, and me in his? 

_No,_ I think, vehement. Not in this life, or any.

“What happened then?” I ask, willing him to continue. 

His embarrassment has settled. He shakes his head. “I’ve been talking for hours, haven’t I? And you’ve barely gotten a word in.” 

“I like hearing you talk,” I say, and it is honest. But his mind is made up. He turns to me with a renewed eagerness. 

“Where did you grow up?” He wants to know. “What was it like there?” 

“Achilles,” I laugh, “I’ll bore you.”

“Never.” He says it with such certainty.

I shrug, in response, and stare at my shoes. “I lived in Utah. This is my first time away from home that I can remember-- you know that.” 

Still, he coaxes me to continue. “Tell me what your town was like.” 

“Small.”

“Pat!” But he is smiling. “What else?” 

I shake my head. “There’s nothing, really,” I say. “I don’t know what you want to hear.” 

“I want to hear-- _you,”_ he says. There is something soft in his eyes. “That’s all.” 

I have no stories about cliff diving. About backpacking, rock climbing, fishing with my father. I have melodramatic hurts, silly little aches behind my ribs. I have my father’s voice in my head, I have _you could have had it worse._ I look at Achilles and smile, lopsided. “You can ask me to stop, whenever, if it’s-- if you--”

“Tell me,” he says. 

 

\---

 

I begin with my sunlight memories. 

That ocean sound. 

That precious snow day.

What I remember about my mother. Her smile, her bell-chime laugh, the way her hair had shimmered-- 

The way it had gone dull, spread out over the coffin’s pillow.

Small towns, so tight knit. Small towns, and their so-called community love. The woman at the abortion clinic, the way she had bent into herself as the crowd around her had surged, and fumed, and screamed. Church services, and the way that the pastor’s thin lips had twisted around the word, _abomination._

My father’s frown. My father’s disappointment. My father, dark eyes and darker anger, _don’t you dare take my--_

“Patroclus,” says Achilles, sharply. His eyes have gone wide, spilling over with hurt and disbelief, as I have been talking. His mouth is crooked, like there is something there that he wants to spit out, but doesn’t know how. 

He is angry, I realize. But it is a feeling he is not so intimately familiar with. And it is not-- 

It is not at me. 

Achilles opens his mouth like he is about to speak again but I tell him, wait. I tell him, there is something else.

I say, I was seventeen years old, when I killed the boy that lived down the street from me.

 

\---

 

His face is impassive, as he listens to me recite the story. My voice sounds mechanical even to my own ears, and it takes everything I have to keep going, until the end. 

How I had not seen him coming.

The crumpled side of the car. 

The blood and brains on the dash. 

_I wish you were dead._

Old news, by now.

Achilles looks at me and the anger is gone entirely, replaced with waves of pity that brim at the edges of his expression. His voice is quiet, when he speaks. “You didn’t need to tell me that,” he says.

I am resolute. “I wanted to.”

He reaches for my hand. “You know that it wasn’t your fault, Pat, right?” 

“That doesn’t make him any less dead.” 

“What you went through--”

“I could have had it worse,” I tell him, because it is true. 

Achilles squeezes my fingers in his. 

“That does not mean that you deserved to have it the way you did,” he says. 

It takes the rest of the night for his words to sink through my skin. But to my surprise-- and my relief-- I realize that there is truth to them, too.

 

\---

 

I have stopped flinching altogether, every time the truck engine growls. I have stopped being afraid of many things, with Achilles. So when he pulls over onto the side of the road the next day an hour out of Sacramento, and it is so abrupt that I bounce in my seat, the only thing that sets me on edge is the determined, tight clutch of his shoulders, and the fact that the sun hasn’t even begun to set.

“We’re stopping?” 

His fingers twist and pry at the steering wheel. He does not cut the engine but he does not make to pull forward again, either. “Yes.” 

I hesitate. “At-- at 5:00, already? Isn’t that a little early?” 

He turns, fast, to face me, and I worry for the first time in what seems like forever that I’ve said the wrong thing. 

“I have-- I gotta-- to show you something,” he blurts. The words are jumbled and rushed together but I hear them, all the same, watching him nervously out of the corner of my eye. He is fumbling around for something. My hands twist together in my lap; it isn’t like him, to stammer, or falter. That is my forte. Not his. 

“Here,” Achilles says, his voice higher than I am used to. And he holds up the CD, and jams it into the player. 

When I skip to track 15, he does not stop me. 

 

\---

 

Of all the things to fuss over--

 _Oh, Achilles._

It is a Smiths song. 

I want to laugh, simply for the tension he has built up over something so simple. But he sits there rigidly as it plays all the way through, his knee bouncing quick beneath the wheel, and it sticks in my throat. 

“I’ve--” he flushes, as the song ends, color burning up his cheeks to the tips of his ears. “It’s overplayed. I just put it on because I thought-- I like the way it sounds and I thought that maybe someone else would want to hear it, too, only I never-- I don’t like to play it, for most people. It doesn’t feel-- it never feels--”

He shakes his head. 

“I didn’t think I put it on for you,” he mutters. “But now I-- I feel like maybe I did.”

“Achilles,” I say softly, echoing his own words. “You didn’t need to.”

His hand jumps up, like a reflex, a jerk-knee reaction, and his fingers curl around the back of my neck. 

“I wanted to,” he replies.

Close enough to trace. The gentle, scratchy oblivion of the radio fuzzes out of the backseat speakers. The truck hums and sighs, in lieu of his voice. When he drops his hand back down to his side, I feel like I am missing something.

“Hey,” I ask him, to find it. “Play it again?”

He smiles, a quiet, shy thing, so unlike the fearless one I have come to know. 

And then he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [P.S. Here is my favorite version of That Referenced Smiths Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cnBZJsDrWs)


	10. The Radio; Part II

“Are we getting close?” 

I have been dreaming of that sea salt smell, catching the crashing of waves ringing in my ears. The stretches of pale beach, just smooth sandy crescents along the endless waters. I’m itching to be there, rearing to see it. 

“Close to the ocean,” I clarify. “How many more days do you think it’ll be?” 

Achilles laughs a little, in response. “Getting sick of me already?” 

“No, it’s only that--” I break off, and study him. “We’ve been on the road for a while, now.” 

He nods, clear eyes fixed on the road. “Yeah,” he says. 

“ _Yeah_ as in, _yeah, we’re close?”_

That gets me a stiff shrug in response. “I’d have to, you know, check the map again. But, uh-- yeah. Hey--” and then he’s himself again, smile sunlit and eyes radiant, “wanna make a campfire tonight?” 

 

\---

 

I know how to build a fire, by now. Where to place the kindling, how to curl the flame around dry wood. Having Achilles as a mentor in all things wild has certainly paid off. He is a good teacher, although some aspects of it all, we both know, are beyond me. I still struggle to tie knots. I am decidedly hopeless at throwing up bear bags. But I no longer feel alien here, in the vast expanse of desert, the smattering of mountains in the distance. I no longer hate the cracked, dry earth and hot sun. It’s another home, as long as he is beside me. 

His rhythm of life has become mine. We share it now like we have lived it together, always. _Home._ A mile off of the side of the highway, our tent set up on no-trespass desert and our truck parked on government-owned sand, and yet the word settles comfortably, tucked away in the warm depth of my chest. We sit close beside each other, the gold-ember sparks of the campfire dancing around us like fireflies. He strums away at his guitar, cradled in his arms, a precious thing. _Play something happy,_ I say. _Play something sweet._ Achilles composes melodies effortlessly, serenading me on the spot. _Play Track 15._ Achilles smiles, a ghost of a grin, and sings it low.

“It’s actually been awhile since I’ve picked it up,” he says happily, his neck curved over the guitar, a few golden curls escaping his short, haphazard ponytail and falling at his temple. “I don’t need to practice all that often. It’s muscle memory for me, so I usually only perform for other people. I was thinking, I’m gonna bring it to play for the--”

He blinks, and both his words and music trail off. A shadow falls over his eyes, dropping slowly, like a curtain. 

“Never mind,” he murmurs. 

He resumes, fingers skipping over the strings. 

But I know that there is more, that there is something else. Something he is not telling me. Something in the radio silence and the darkness in his face, visible for a flash of a moment, then erased, like it had never existed in the first place. 

I think, _I shouldn’t ask._ It is not for me to decide what he gives me, and what he does not. It is enough, I remind myself. It should be enough, to simply be allowed at his side. I should not ask for more. 

I should not want him-- all of him-- the way that I do. 

“Here,” Achilles says, breaking through my thoughts. His eyes are bright in the firelight. “Try it out, for yourself.” 

He helps me fold my arms around the instrument, guides my hand in his, shows me where to place my fingers. He watches, delighted, as I slide my fingertips up and down the fretboard, and tug at the strings, marveling at each rich note. 

“It’s beautiful,” I say. 

_You’re beautiful._

 

\---

 

I ask a second time as my eyelids grow heavy, curled next to him in the tiny warm tent. 

“Are we getting close yet, to the sea?” 

He is already asleep, I think, or maybe pretending to be. 

He does not answer.

 

\---

 

He plays the next night, again. And again, he coaxes me to try, his hand settling over the small of my back as he maneuvers the guitar into my arms. 

I am not brave enough to lean into his touch. A half-second more, and it is gone. What I would give to have it back again. To feel him there to steady me. I have been dreaming of that sea salt smell, catching the crashing of waves ringing in my ears, and I have been dreaming of him, there with me, _you’re the reason._

“You’re good at this,” he says; his breath is warm against my neck. It is a lie, of course. The kind of lie that doesn’t matter. I think, we have not lied, about the things that matter. I wonder, does hiding the truth count as a lie? 

Suddenly, I need to hear him answer, more than anything. 

“Achilles,” I blurt, twisting to face him, “why haven’t we reached the coast yet?”

The silence between us is worse than the dissonance of my stumbling chords. The nervous edge hanging in the hush between us tightens around my throat.

I cannot stand it. “Please tell me.” 

“There’s a ghost town about an hour away from here,” Achilles says. His voice is smooth and mellow, unchanged but for the strange distance in the quiet of his words. “They call it Bodie. You wanna go?” 

A shard of restlessness slices through me. “And then the ocean?” 

He hesitates. “Of course,” he says.

 

\---

 

Bodie is a haunting kind of breathtaking, everything exactly where its long-buried occupants have left it. Bowls discarded at at the kitchen table. Lessons etched out on the schoolhouse chalkboard. There are even cars, red-rust tinted and hollowed out where the wheels should be, brambles poking through their gnarled frames in search of the sun. 

It is mid-afternoon, the sun blazing away overhead, and the dusty streets are barren, the tumbleweed our only other companions. Our laughter rings through the empty, crumbling ruins. Our footsteps creak and echo over the old wooden floors. We press our noses up against the smudged glass of each store and call out what we see to each other. 

_A toy doll, Achilles--_

_The mannequin, Pat--_

_See all those tobacco tins?_

_The spin-globe on the right?_

“There’s so much still here,” I marvel, craning my head back to take in the tavern lobby, the hundreds of preserved glass bottles lining the shelves. “I’m half-expecting the Sheriff to swagger in and demand a duel right now.” 

“I’d fight him,” Achilles says, delighted. 

“You’d win.”

“I know!” He laughs. “Can you imagine if we just decided to stay here, for the rest of our lives? I’ll be the new Sheriff, you can be the Mayor. We’ll rebuild everything! We’ll open the gates!”

I can’t help but smile. “Who would want to live here?” 

“Are you kidding?” He grabs my hand, spins me. “Who wouldn’t? We’ll take anyone and everyone!” 

“Thieves and beggars?” 

“Gamblers and whores!” 

“Every outcast!” 

“What do you say, Pat?” He is still gripping my hands, clasping them tightly in his. “In or out, what’s your call?” 

“In.” It is not as easy, this time, but I still mean it, with everything I have, the way I had meant it before. Home, wherever he is. “A thousand times.”

We put our ghost town exploration on hold for a break outside of the broken-down, blue-tinged factory perched on the side of the hill. Our packs are propped up against the barbed-wire fence; Achilles has been stretching, massaging out sore muscles from the drive. At some point I feel his eyes on me. When I look up from where I’ve been whittling away obliviously at a stick-- using an old pocketknife I'd found discarded on the unpaved road-- he is regarding me thoughtfully.

"You look different," he says.

"Different?" I frown, suddenly self-conscious. "Different how?” 

“I don’t know, exactly." He wanders closer and I tip my head up to see the way the light softens his eyes. “It’s something about the way you-- the way you hold yourself. The way you move. You don’t startle so easily, anymore.” 

“You bring it out in me.” 

“Maybe.” He narrows his eyes a little, studying my face, and I fail to hide my smile at his solemn concentration. “Or maybe-- here.” He reaches out, and ghosts a finger across the soft plane of my cheek, speckled with light patches of stubble. I fight back a shiver; the faint traces of his touch remain even after he draws back. “Like this, you look older.” 

“Really?” I touch my chin, the roughness there. It hasn’t occurred to me, how long it’s been since I’ve properly shaved, and I laugh, suddenly. “I don’t suppose you brought a shaving kit with you?”

“I do have a razor packed,” Achilles replies, smirking. “It’s in the truck. Usually I use the side mirrors, but…” He shrugs, scuffs the toe of his tennis shoe in the dirt. “It looks-- on you, it looks fine. You should just let it grow out, until we get to a city.”

“I’ll look like a hobo,” I say ruefully.

Achilles snorts. “You _are_ a hobo. Technically speaking, at the moment, we both are. But-- ouch! Ceasefire!”

I heft the stick above my head, ready to whack him again. “I am perfectly civilized.”

“We’ve slept on the side of the road for two weeks straight,” Achilles reminds me. _“Ouch--_ I _surrender,_ you beast--”

But he evades my next playful swing easily, quick fingers snagging my wrist mid-air and tugging, using my momentum against me. I stumble, briefly, against him, and he laughs, the high, clear peals ringing through the desert air. 

“Come on,” he says, grinning, tossing the stick away. He has not let go of me yet. Secretly, I soak in the warmth of his skin against mine. “Tell me-- do I look any different, from when we first met?” 

I look at him, thinking, studying. My eyes travel over the inquisitive set of his brow, the angles of the faint shadows beneath his eyes. _I could look at him for hours._

Achilles spreads his arms, a slow, wide gesture, inviting my judgement. “So?” 

I shrug, desperately hoping that he will not see the faint blush gathering in my cheeks. “Sure, I guess.”

“Where?” he presses.

“Your hair is longer.” I motion toward his curls. “It wasn’t all long enough to fit when you tied it up, before, but now it does.” 

“Where else?” He is eager to know.

“Here, I think.” I smile, taking his hands in mine and turning them over, brushing my thumb across the calluses rebuilding on his fingertips. “Because you have played so often, lately.” 

If his voice is higher than usual, I do not notice. “Where else?” 

“Here.” I lift my hand and trace carefully, methodically, over the uneven, unshaven angle of his jaw. “We match, with this.” My fingers brush over the dip above his chin. And then the hollow of his cheek, my thumb skimming the soft skin of his temple-- 

My gaze drops to his lips.

“Patroclus?”

Almost an exhale, rather than a name. I have not realized that he has been watching me until he speaks, his breath soft against the bare skin of my wrist. My heart surges into my throat, as my eyes flicker up to his, and read the perplexity etched there. 

_What am I doing?_

I flinch back. 

“Uh,” I say, my face heating as I force my hands down to my sides, clearing my throat. “Sorry.”

He runs a hand over his jaw, tracing the same path that my fingers had taken. “It’s okay,” he says, quietly. He is all somber eyes, and stone skin.

“I’m-- we should get going.” I stand and move away, toward the fence, relieved for an excuse to put space between us and grateful that my back is to him. I fuss with my backpack, zipping and unzipping flaps just to still the tremor in my hands, and sit back on my heels, exhaling quietly. I’ll give it a few more seconds, I decide. When I turn back around, it will be forgotten. When I turn back around, the moment will have passed. 

“Patroclus,” Achilles says from behind me. His voice is low. 

I pretend I am still busy with the pack. “Uh-huh?”

Achilles is silent for a moment. 

Then he says, “Come here.”

His voice is uncertain, and it takes me by surprise. I get to my feet.

“What?” I ask. 

I receive no reply. He is not even looking at me. I move forward, and an aching, smarting pain coils around me, like vines, twisting up into my chest. _He will not even look at me._

“Achilles,” I say, rawly, the vines of hurt tightening, as he steps a little toward me, gaze cast down. I brace myself. _Let it be over quickly, if he is angry._

His eyes flicker to mine, at last. 

“Will you--” he says. His voice falters, stuttered words crumbling to ash. I have never heard him like this, before. My heart beats faster, nervous birds fluttering in my throat. “Patroclus,” he says, again, steadying himself. “Will you kiss me?”

My mind blanks.

I stare at him. 

“What?”

“Will you--” he colors, deep scarlet creeping up into the tips of his ears. Still, he repeats it. “Kiss me,” he says, quietly. 

I want to shove him, hard, and watch as what is surely false, pretend hope is wiped from his eyes. He will laugh. He will say, _the look on your face._

_Priceless._

But I do not know if it is in him, the capacity to be cruel-- not to me, at least. 

Never to me. 

“Why?” I ask. The word cracks, halfway out of my mouth. 

His breath hitches and I see his fingers twitch, as if he wants to reach for me. “Why not?” he answers. 

Oh, I think, that is clever. It does not have to mean anything, this way. _Why not?_ A careless solution for curiosity. For boredom. _Kiss me, just because._

I study his face. He does not look curious, or bored. He looks like he is barely breathing. He looks frozen. His eyes are locked on mine, now, and I remember him clearly, behind the wheel of his truck on the first day, saying, _trust me._ I remember him vaguely, in some other time, saying, _you’re the reason._

Achilles looks at me, and waits. 

“Fine,” I say.

I can hear the blood roaring in my ears. _Like the ocean._

“Just--” I say. “Just once.” 

“Fine,” he replies. It is so quiet. Another exhale. Barely a word. 

I hesitate, and I see him tilt forward, infinitesimally, eyelids the color of pink-slate granite, falling closed. 

I press my lips to his, outside of the empty, blue-graying factory, on the hill above the forgotten town. I kiss him, the way I have imagined. Soft, and slow. _Careful,_ a voice in the back of my mind urges me. _Be careful,_ with him. I keep my hands at my sides, even though they want to grip, and hold. Our noses bump, clumsily. He is deathly still against me. 

He does not kiss back. 

He does not flee, either. 

I draw away. 

His eyes are still closed. 

“Achilles?” 

His lids lift, irises green flecked gold. The sun, over the sea. 

I cannot read him. Close enough to trace one minute, so far away the next. I open my mouth to say something-- _I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. Forget it, please._

“Achilles,” I start, and the look in his eyes flickers. 

He surges forward. 

He kisses me with all of the fire that I had lacked. His mouth opens over mine, hot. He bites down on my lip, and the noise that comes out of me is embarrassingly bewildered, torn between a groan and a whimper. My knees weaken. My brain short-circuits. He kisses me, and I go dizzy.

His hands are all over me; I press into them hungrily as they flit, unsure, over my shoulders, smooth down my chest. He finds the edge of my shirt and slips his palms up underneath the hem. His fingers are cold over my stomach. He takes hold of my waist, his thumbs pressing against my hipbones. 

“Oh,” I say, gasping against his mouth. I am drowning in him-- and still, it is like breathing fresh air for the first time. I reach up and wind my hands into his hair, running the thick curls through my fingers. 

“Is this--” he kisses me, deeply. _He is so much better at this than I am._ “--okay?”

 _God._ I am flushing, leaning into him, practically trembling. “Yes. Yes.” A small part of me desperately hopes that I do not sound like I am begging. Most of me does not care. 

He kisses me again. His tongue soothes over where he had bitten down, before. He is easing back, not so frantic, anymore. “You said-- _just once,”_ he says, resting his forehead against mine. 

“Yes,” I agree, “I said that.” We are both winded, as if we have been climbing mountains, daring new heights. “But you said-- _why not.”_

He laughs. 

And then it catches. 

“Fuck,” he says, and closes his eyes. He leans his head against my shoulder, and my hands rest at his back. His breathing is still uneven. “Fuck,” he says again; his throat sounds tight, voice choked, words broken. “I didn’t mean-- I never thought-- Pat, I’m so sorry.” 

I don’t understand. _He is sorry? What for?_ But my mind is the clearest it has been in days, with him so near to me, and I know his scattered, ragtag way of speech, when he is upset. _Be careful, with him._ “Are you-- are you sorry because-- you regret it?” 

His head snaps up. “No,” he says, breathless, and relief courses through me. “It’s--” he begins, and cuts himself off, then begins again, struggling with the words. “It’s not you,” he says, drawing back to smooth away a dark lock of hair from where it’s fallen, over my eyes. “I swear, it’s-- there’s something else.” 

_Something he has not told me, something in the radio silence--_ “What?” 

Achilles looks away. His lips are slightly swollen, where I’ve kissed him. _Tell me,_ I want to say. _Even if it is bad. I want to know._

“I don’t want to see the ocean,” he says. “Because then-- it will be over.” 

“Oh, Achilles,” I murmur. So this is why he has been stalling? “Even after we get there-- it doesn’t have to be the end.” 

“It will be.” His olive brow creases, the look in his eyes wild now, haunted. “I-- there’s something I have to do. After we reach the Atlantic, I-- I can’t stay on the coast, not for long.”

I wait for him to explain, but he doesn’t. He is a trailblazer, I think. Of course, he would not want to settle anywhere, for too long. He likes the road. The free feeling, of belonging nowhere, and everywhere. But even if he is leaving, perhaps it is not far. Canada, maybe. Mexico. I will follow him there, if he’ll let me. I will wait for him, if he would rather I stay. “Where are you going?” I ask, needing to hear it, desperate to know-- everything. Every piece of him, that I am still missing. What he is ashamed of. What he regrets. His flaws, his faults, his fears--

“You know-- they’re talking about sending more troops to Baghdad,” he says. 

“So?” I shake my head, “what’s that have to do with--”

He seizes up, like a bowstring, and I can see the way he hesitates, taught. 

Then something in him snaps, and the arrow flies. 

“I enlisted,” he says, “two months ago.”

He says, “I leave in the fall.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm totally in love with Mr. Robot lately so I spent most of this chapter listening to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GDj0xdN_t4) on repeat. Seriously, check it. It's gorgeous and so ambient and the kind of song you can physically feel.
> 
> As a part of my roadtrip this summer I actually did go to Bodie; it was a huge part of what inspired this fic. If you're interested in getting an idea of what it looks like, and if you wanna see the blue factory, some of the pics that I took of the town can be found [here.](http://friend-of-the-abc.tumblr.com/post/126778717247/ghost-town-of-bodie-ca) If you're ever passing through lower CA, definitely go! It costs next-to-nothing to get in, and it's an incredible, eerie experience.  
>    
> Just about two chapters left...buckle down and strap in. I'm so not ready to let go of this story but it's something I gotta do. As always, I love hearing from you, and comments/crit are always welcome.


	11. The Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we get started, I have a few things to talk about. 
> 
> The Surge was officially announced about 3 months after this fic takes place, and the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal didn't happen until 2010, three and a half years after this fic ends. That being said: 1. everyone knew that the U.S. was doing poorly in the war, and that a wave of new troops was likely, and 2. if Achilles was openly gay in the military, he would have been discharged, pronto. Hopefully that gives you a little more background to what happened last chapter, and his reluctance in this one. 
> 
> Actually I think I'll slow down and back up and stop assuming that everyone reading this is American-- for those of you who don't know/don't remember, the Surge happened back in 2007, and sent over 20,000 additional troops into Iraq. The new troops were mainly based in Baghdad, which was one of the most dangerous areas at the time. On top of that, many of the soldiers who were already there had their tours extended. The plan was supposed to be the final push that would help America win the war, but since the war was a stupid fucking idea in the first place, it didn't do much other than spend a lot of money and get a lot of people killed.
> 
> I wish I could talk more about the war in the fic, because it's an issue personal to me. But that's another story and I'm not going to project it into this one any more than I need to. I just wanted to let you all know that I don't take it lightly.

The things I could say. 

_Please, don’t go._

The things I don’t say.

 _Stay here. Stay with me._

What comes out of my mouth, instead-- 

_Why didn’t you tell me?_

_How could you have kept this to yourself?_

_Why? Why, why--_

There is nothing inherently wrong with his wanting to serve and yet I cannot tame the fear that chokes me when I think of him in uniform. When I imagine his face swimming in the countless rows of sameness-- identical rows, straight-backed shoulders. Buzzed clean-cuts-- _they will make him shorten his hair._ For some reason that, of all things, is what loosens my tongue. 

"They need me," he is saying. "They need whoever they can get. The guy at the recruitment office, he says they're hurting, everybody says they're planning something big so if I wanna get over there, now's my chance--"

“Why?” I demand, my voice a shaking, wild thing. “Why do you want to go?” 

“Patroclus--” Achilles looks torn, helpless. “I don’t know,” he bursts out, hands open palms-up, pleading, baring himself to me. “It’s only that-- sometimes-- I feel like there are certain things, that just aren’t my choice. Like it’s beyond my control. As if--”

_There some things that I am supposed to do._

“Like you and the ocean, Pat. That’s me, with this, okay?”

I want to gather him in my arms, to feel him solid against me. To hold him now, because once he is gone, it will be harder to remember if he was ever real. 

_It will be harder to remember._ The realization strikes like a bolt of lightning. Halfway around the world and he will be nothing but a memory, and then a percentage-- KIA, or MIA, and even if he comes back breathing and not boxed he will not be the same. I have seen the emptiness in the eyes of the off-the-boat veterans, staring into the newscast cameras, heard snippets of their quiet, stiffened speech. He knows our desert like the back of his hand but theirs is another reality entirely. 

In one year, in two-- will he remember me the way I will surely remember him? Will he have thought of me, the way I will surely think of him? Will he look for me? Will he want me? 

The answer sinks into my gut. The world will shudder beneath his feet while I stay grounded. After he is gone I will still be here, time spiraling by like whirlpool waves-- 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. 

Now I understand why. 

My chest feels like it is caving in but I force the words out, all the same. “It would be easier, wouldn’t it? To not-- for me-- for us, to not--?”

_To not be together._

Achilles looks away. 

“Yes,” he says. “It would be easier.”

 

\---

 

The memories come, at last, then, and somehow, I am not surprised. 

As if I had known they were coming, all along. 

It happens all at once, a flood. They manifest after the sun sinks, settling in my unconscious mind as wisps of dreams, sharpening into a rippling reflection-- Achilles, riding into the gleaming city of Babylon, a white-feathered plume arching above the crest of his helmet. Achilles, lifting a crimson-stained sword, a blood-red cross splayed across his chest. Achilles, storm-sea wind in his hair as he urges his crew onward, his hand gripping the rain-slicked wheel of the ship, the coast of Africa on their horizon. _Achilles, Achilles, Achilles._

He is always the same. 

Flame-eyed. 

Prideful. 

His smile, sad, and sweet, and sunlit. 

And there is me-- fate threading us together, always there beside him-- again, and again, and again. 

Florence, Italy; he is in the uniform of a guard. I am an artist victim to the Renaissance, hurrying through cobblestone streets, and when I stumble in front of him, brushes and paints spilling out of my arms, he stoops to help me collect them. He smiles at my work, showers me in pretty poet words. For weeks after, I bring an easel and canvas to the square he is stationed at. I pretend to paint the church, behind him; I paint him, instead. The first time we kiss, he cries quietly, for hours afterward, while I stroke his hair. He hates our sin, but he loves me, more. 

When he is called away to the fight against Charles VIII, I go with him. 

Balaclava, Crimea; they have sent him to serve alongside the French, and the Ottomans, and the Scottish. I am in his brigade, watching him juggle smooth stones for the entertainment of the men around the campfire. He is so bright, a burst of color in the dull monotony of the ranks. I cannot look away. He tosses one of the stones my way. Catch, he says, and holds my gaze long after the rest of the men have stopped applauding. There has been talk of Russian movement outside of our defenses. War is not the place for such things. He steals into my tent when it is dark, anyway. 

He leaves my side before the sun has risen, and in the morning the artillery tears us apart.

England, Great Britain; he is a young earl, inheriting the grand estate I have served for years already. I can feel his eyes on me the minute he enters the house. As his valet I undress him, every night, and he watches me watch him, from the reflection in the mirror. There is a strain between us that is hard to ignore, my eyes fixed on the floor, his eyes fixed on me. When I cannot stand it any longer I settle my hands around his waist; he stills beneath them, turning toward me as I speak his name, my heart racing. My hands rise to clasp the back of his neck. Our mouths meet. He asks me if I am sorry. I say, I am not. 

When the Archduke is assassinated, I am conscripted into the army. When he finds out, he volunteers. 

At some point we cross the ocean. I do not know how many of our lifetimes it takes. There is always war, and we are always subject to it. Always trembling over each other, imagining how it will take us. _The never-ending ache of love and sorrow._

Sometimes, I can barely stand to stay. 

But it is harder, to be without him.

Mostly, I let the way he loves me eclipse the way it hurts. 

 

\---

 

I do not ask him if he remembers. 

I think, it will be better, if he does not.

 

\---

 

The waves plunge down heavy on the faded golden beach and it is everything I had hoped for and more, the sound thundering in my ears in its rough pattern, over and over, reminding me to breathe, to keep breathing-- 

Seagulls scatter when we run toward the water, screaming in joy; Achilles does not even take off his shoes, just plunges into the surf and pulls me along with him. It’s cold but we do not care. The salt stings our eyes and the waves slam against our bodies but we do not stop. Achilles dives beneath a wave and comes up soaking, his hair in disarray, his laugh clear-- he coaxes me out further and further from the shore, until our feet cannot graze the sand and we are free-floating, at the mercy of the ocean.

Home, I think, wildly. Home, we are home. 

We must swim for hours, soaking in the sun and the sea, until the sky darkens, and the water blackens, and the salt settles into our clothes. There is a plateau nearby, a high cliff jutting out over the beach to overlook the water, and we park the truck at the far end and watch the waves from the edge, as the sunset scatters colors across the sky.

“Tomorrow we can swim again,” Achilles promises. “And then explore-- I actually think I saw some fig trees at the cliff base, we should head down in the morning and check it out--”

I sit next to him as he talks, chattering about the wildlife here, the kinds of seashells he wants to find. The sound of his voice melts into soothing white noise as he works to get a fire going, but my chest feels torn open. _After tomorrow, then what?_ The things I don’t say-- _when does it end? When will he say goodbye?_

 

\---

 

We sleep beneath the stars, not bothering to pull out the tent. That night the air is filled with the crash of the waves, the rush of the black ocean below us. The tips of the thin, whiplash trees stir lazily, circling the night sky like they are linking the planets, far away. 

I am afraid to find sleep again. 

I long to reach out and feel him, solid and warm, beside me, to take his hand in mine, to chase the lives we have already lived from my mind. It tugs at me as I lie on our earthy pallet and stare up into the star-spotted nothingness stretched out above us, waiting for exhaustion to overtake me. 

Achilles shifts beside me. “Pat?” he whispers. “You awake?”

“I can’t sleep.” 

“Me neither.” In the darkness I see him twist his bottom lip between his teeth; then he reaches out, brushes the back of his knuckles against my forearm. “Want to count out the constellations again?” 

When I nod, he wriggles over until he is nestled up next to me. The smell of him is familiar, the heat of his body consoling. He takes my wrist in his hand and guides my arm up. _Virgo, Ursa Minor, Hercules._ We map out the sky together. The paths the stars take is a well-worn road. 

But that tug in me is almost unbearable. Even as I paint the invisible lines between the cosmos, all I truly want is to press myself to him, to satisfy the raw, heavy hurt. “Achilles--” 

He tips his head toward mine, and our eyes meet. My voice is thin and nervous when I ask, but still, in this moment, it is the only question that has ever truly mattered. 

“Do you think we would have met, in another life?” 

He is quiet for a long time, and so near that I can hear the steady sound of his heartbeat, as I wait for his answer. When he does speak, he chooses his words slowly, like he is tasting them before he lets them breathe free air. I have always loved that about him. How deliberate he is, with what he says to me.

“I think,” he says, “if we had-- you would have found me, even if I ran from you.” 

There is something in that, that I don’t understand, and that, I suspect, I am not meant to. I almost ask him what he means. 

But the sun has long since disappeared beneath the horizon, and he will be gone in the fall. 

“I would have been glad, to be found again,” I hear Achilles whisper. “Patroclus--” 

When I turn over, shifting uncomfortably beneath the sleeping bag, he is there, close. 

He looks at me gently.

I flush for no other reason than the moonlight over his temple, the clear smooth angle of his jaw. “Sorry,” I murmur, making to turn away from him again. 

He catches my arm before I can. 

When I look at him next it is like my expression is mirrored in his eyes; we are both surprised at his gesture. He blinks at me with an intensity akin to anger but softer, closer to confusion, or hurt, or perhaps both. 

_I did not think--_

He exhales. 

_I did not think we would ever--_

He does not say it out loud. 

Neither do I. 

“Patroclus,” he says, again, instead. 

_Pa-tro-clus._

And it is easy, after that, for my eyes to drop to his mouth. 

I do not think of how he is leaving. I do not think of _it would be easier._ He leans forward, closing the space between us, and I think, _what else matters?_

It is intimately familiar, this time, as if he is an instrument I had once loved to play. I relearn him, fingers stumbling over his body, sweeping away the ghosting dust coating my memory of what I remember and collecting the fragments of what I do not. His mouth is soft, his skin stone-smooth. I know, somehow, when I dip to press my mouth to his neck, that he will gasp, the way he does. I know the way he says my name, his pulse thudding wildly beneath my lips. 

The confidence fades, though, and soon enough I am at a loss. I want more, all of him, but I do not know where to start, how to ask. I do not know what to do, other than to nip at his mouth, his jaw, the hard lines of his throat and collarbone. It is already a miracle, as inexperienced as I am, that I have not driven him away. 

“Can I--?” Achilles is less clueless. Still, the deep color in his face and the tremor in his voice give him away. He is nervous, too-- but when I nod, he kicks the sleeping bag off of both of us, presses a hand to my chest, and lowers me to the ground, his knees tight against the edges of my hips, rocking against me steadily, leaving me moaning, trembling. His always-deft fingers shake, peeling away the layers of clothing that separate us; his palm slicks us together and then I cannot help the cry that slips past my lips, as his thumb flicks against me, as he arcs forward. 

It is all at once too much, and not enough. It is a wave of pleasure breaking over me and an ache that drives me clutching against him, my fingernails dug into his back. I try to say things, I think. Things like _please,_ and _more,_ and _Achilles, Achilles,_ but I cannot form words at all, only sounds, high and winded. 

My body shudders under him with every movement he makes against me. His kisses go softer with every quiet, quavering sound I do not try to stifle. He kisses me, kisses the noises off of my lips, grinding against me rhythmically, his hand stroking both of us, and I close my eyes, and I think, I wish we had more time. 

I think, I wish that just this once, he would let history swallow him unknown. 

I think, I want him to stay.

I want him to stay. The way he has never stayed, before. I want him to care about what could happen to him. I want him to be afraid, of what surely will. 

I want him to look at me. 

I say his name, cup his face in my hands, thumbs against his cheekbones. I press my forehead to his. His rhythm stutters, his hips quivering, and we breathe together, gasping. 

My fingers fix in his hair. I bury my face into the crook of his neck. _See, Achilles,_ I plead silently. _This is what you are giving up. I am what you are letting go._

I know he does not need me, to be whole. But I wish he would want me, enough to stay. 

I wish I was enough.

 

\---

 

It is only when we have finished, hot and sticky and awkwardly grounded against each other, that we realize we have nothing to clean ourselves up with.

Achilles laughs, with a sheepish edge, and rifles through his pack until he finds a spare shirt. 

“Sorry,” I murmur, out of habit, as he wipes away the mess on our stomachs. 

“Don’t be,” he replies, gathering up the dirtied clothing and tucking it at the foot of our packs. “Never with me.” 

I have learned that Achilles does not usually stumble over words. That he says exactly what he means, always. 

I have also learned that he does not often ask what he should.

I see the question, burning wordlessly in the set of his shoulders and the way he does not meet my eyes, reaching to pull the sleeping bag back over us-- 

_Will you come with me?_

He wants me safe. Far away, from where he is going. I do not know if he knows, how we are caught like gulls in the eye of a hurricane, a whirling, eternal storm. But I know that he desperately does not want to ask, even if it eats away at him, at his soul.

I draw him against me, as we settle, his back to my chest, my hand running over his hip, across his stomach, stopping to rest just beneath his heart. He lets out a quiet breath, the unspoken question still hanging over us like the dark clouds that gather before rain, and I let my lips rest against the nape of his neck. 

“Yes,” I whisper against his skin. “Of course, I will follow you there.”

And that is my answer.


	12. Morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to wait until the 16th to post this, so that it would be the 2 month anniversary of the beginning, but I couldn't sit on this for that long!
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading. I'm a broken record at this point but it means so much to me that you've all stuck around for this.

The sun is what wakes me.

My eyelids lift heavy, curtain-like, the sea birds sailing above me on white wings, cawing to each other with their hoarse, sharp cries. Their feathers dapple light shadows over my sleep-rusted eyes, the cliff rock beneath my bedroll still damp with dew. Beneath the cliffside the waves turn over endlessly, a pale foam-green in the early morning light.

Unease drops like a stone in my gut as my gaze falls to the space next to me. 

Achilles is not beside me. 

The air is still warming to the sun’s rays, and my body is pleasantly sore-- from the swim, and from Achilles’ frantic touch, the night before-- so at first I am reluctant to move. It is easier for my eyes to fall closed again, to stay wrapped up where I am, suspended in the slow-fading cocoon of daybreak. But eventually I do wriggle my way out, using my fingers to wrestle my hair into some semblance of its normal state. “Achilles?” I call, dusting off my knees and stuffing my feet back into my tennis shoes. 

No answer. He cannot have gone far. His pack is missing, but he has left the sleeping bag we’d shared. 

_And there is me,_ a small, timid voice calls out from the back of my mind. _He would not have left me, either._

_He would not have gone without me._

Before Achilles, I had never woken up next to anyone, and so it is a given, then, that conversely, I had never woken up _without_ anyone, either. The emptiness that his presence should fill sets me at a loss, and I am unable to reassure myself with anything concrete. I clamber toward the dirt path and the bushes at the far end of the plateau, where he had parked his truck. 

“Achilles?”

The truck is gone.

My breath catches, the unease swelling into something much colder. 

_Maybe he left a note._

I fumble back toward my pack, heart beating wildly, checking under our pillows and shaking out the sleeping bag. There is nothing there. 

And suddenly-- 

I am alone as ever. 

As alone as I was after my mother’s death, on the stage of my graduation, huddling under the bridge of the overpass. Everything I had been so certain of-- the familiarity of his touch, the magnetic way that I had been drawn to his voice-- it had been _him,_ in my arms again after who-knows-how-many lifetimes of holding empty air, of missing him without ever meeting him, of the ocean in my mind soothing me to sleep and the salt-wave-smell wrapping around me, more of what it felt like to belong than I had ever known. 

_He would not have gone without me--_

I had been so sure. Reality is a cold and unfeeling knife to the gut.

The unease has mutated past fear, the nature of it changed, thick and choking. He has left. He is gone. _No,_ I think, fiercely, desperately, half out of my mind, _not like this, not this time,_ but it is too late. 

An compulsion rises in me that I do not know how to satisfy. I want to cry, or laugh, hysterically, or hit something, hard, again and again, until my knuckles are split and cracked and bleeding and hurting, more than it hurts to be left behind-- 

_I am not the one who is supposed to be left behind._

Overwhelmed and finding it difficult to breathe, my legs give way; I sit abruptly, thudding down among what he's left of our supplies.

And then--

And then.

The warm, friendly growl of the truck engine.

Through an ocean roar of relief, I hear the car door slam. Through blurry saltwater eyes, I see him jogging toward me.

“Patroclus,” he calls, holding up his pack like a trophy. He tosses it beside me, and wild, Californian figs roll out of the open flap, fat and ripe, bumping against my thigh.

“I bet I can eat more than you,” Achilles says, smiling, like the sun.

And I burst into tears.

 

\---

 

There is no way to explain it to him, not in any way that he could possibly understand. I don’t know how to begin. Where to start. What happens when I try is a mess of everything, all at once. 

_Stay with me,_ I remember saying, eyes squeezed shut, tears hot, welling. _Listen to me, this time, please, don’t go._

_I’ve loved you for longer than I’ve known you._

_I know you better than I know myself._

_Am I going insane?_

_Or do you know me that way, too?_

_I love you._

_I’ve loved you._

_Remember, Achilles?_

_Don’t you remember?_

 

\---

 

There is no way to explain it to him but he understands, all the same. One of the mysteries shared, incomprehensibly, between us.

He touches my hand, where my knuckles smooth into the back of my palm.

He says only three words. But there is so much relief there, and pain, aching in the clear tones of his voice, that has built cathedrals on the base of his body, that has layered over years, spanned generations-- 

“I remember you,” he says.

I look up, to read it in his face. 

He kisses me.

The sharp ocean smell is there, like comfort, like home. Not just on the winds of the air but in him, enveloping him. It is in his skin, his hair, his clothes. On his lips. In his eyes. I wind my arms around his neck and I feel his quiet tears on my skin, mingling with my own, and I think, I will never have enough of it. Enough of him. It will take lifetimes, after this one, to fill. It will take an eternity.

But it will be this, always. 

For as long as he lets me. 

Again. 

And again. 

And again.


	13. Epilogue

It has a simple ending, as all things so intricate do. 

On a beach, cold ocean waves crashing at their feet, there are two boys, one most beloved, the other a once-hero, a never-god. They know death, but not so intimately as they once have. They know pain, but they carry it closely, shared. The Fates look on from the depths of their cracked chambers, and let them be. The gods watch from the ruins of their forgotten heaven, and do not interfere. 

_Enough,_ the immortal whispers. _We have done enough._

In the faint, last touches of the sun, the two boys reach for each other. Their hands meet, and twilight unfolds above them like black ink, spilling over the last page of an unfinished story.

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _All love stories are frustration stories...It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies._
> 
>  
> 
> \- Adam Phillips
> 
>  
> 
> \---
> 
>  
> 
> 1\. As some of you know, a whole lot of this fic's inspiration came from a roadtrip that I took a few months ago-- but the fic name is actually taken from a song. If there's one last thing I'm allowed to ask you to do, it's to listen to [Keaton Henson's "10 AM, Gare Du Nord.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8f9sMxzdFM)
> 
> 2\. Secondly, thank you so much to everyone who left kudos/comments, they really motivated me to push to the end! Specifically: 
> 
> \- [GoodFrith](http://archiveofourown.org/users/GoodFrith/pseuds/GoodFrith) and aziciel, you were super supportive right from the very beginning. Also your reactions always made me smile! <3
> 
> \- [Ratatoeskr](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ratatoeskr/pseuds/Ratatoeskr) and [kevinbaconandeggs](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kevinbaconandeggs/pseuds/kevinbaconandeggs), you picked out phrases and bits that you liked and overall just had these wonderful detailed comments, and I can't even begin to tell you how much I appreciated that. I doubt my own writing a lot, and you made me feel more confident in my work! 
> 
> \- [teethonmydress](http://archiveofourown.org/users/teethonmydress/pseuds/teethonmydress).......I LOVE YOU, AND YOUR WRITING! also, subway fic reading aesthetic, on point. (Go read their Patrochilles fic, it's also a reincarnation fic and it's called "I Would Know Him In Death" and it's wonderful)
> 
> 3\. I wanted to leave the ending vague and open-ended, and give over the specifics to your imagination. All you need to know is that the gods who were to blame for the cycle have stopped interfering. So does the cycle end, or does the cycle continue? Your choice. 
> 
> I have my own idea of what happens, but I don't want to say. If you're really curious pop into my inbox and I'll share.
> 
> 4\. TSOA was something that I stumbled over when I really needed it, and I'm just really glad to be alive right now. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for reading. 
> 
> I'm gonna really miss you guys, especially those of you that I've talked to in the comments, so if you want to keep in touch, definitely hit me up on [tumblr.](http://bygoneboy.tumblr.com)


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